I'm embarking on a new solo moving image project, provisionally titled The walls tremble, the furniture stamps its feet.*
It's about female spirit mediums of the late 19th and early 20th century. During séances, mediums would demonstrate the presence of other-worldly forces by the tilting of tables and the animation of other domestic objects. Some of this activity was taken to be genuine; on other occasions it proved to be cleverly engineered conjuring tricks. I like this blurring of boundaries; this rubbing up of belief against scepticism, nature against artifice, art against science.
While my end-goal is the making of a short film, which has its own language of trickery and haunting, I find myself heading down quite a sculptural path. I've been looking at ways to make domestic objects tremble, wobble and vibrate. By initiating the visible movement of things we think of as inert or static, I'm acknowledging their agency but also hoping to set in motion - or at least suggest - something more unexpected and strange.
I'm hopeful these misbehaving objects will act as a symbol of the way Victorian certainties were being disrupted by rapid developments in science and technology as well as by massive social change.
*I've drawn my title from an account of a séance by a French journalist in 1857, sourced via an article 'The medium on the stage' by Simone Natale (2011) in Early Popular Visual Culture 9:3 239-255
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