House of Breath

This is a 10 minute single-screen moving image work rear projected onto opaque film.

The film depicts a walk, starting at a grass ridge inland until we reach the sea’s edge, and this journey through the landscape is intercut with the associated engendered memory. Digital footage is combined with cine, still image sequences, found film and stills. This ‘collaged’ film depicts a psycho-geographic journey through different spaces to the light wide open sea, with both the audio and visuals reflecting the theme of flow; breath into and from the lungs, wind, evidenced by what it moves, and even more invisible, the ‘pneuma’ a flow of energy, or creative force, and departures on the water’s edge, on wing, and air, and of breath, a motif which resonates throughout the work.

The mix of imagery reflects the overlaying of experience, contrasting the ordinary with the extra-ordinary like material in a collage. These spaces, sometimes real, sometimes imagined, and sometimes ritualised relate to the human need to find psychological refuge in familiar places and spaces. The film reflects on the invisible energies found in these different environments and their manifestations. A chaise longue sits in a room purportedly used for Victorian séances, like the low tide sea bed, a place of liminality, between nowhere and somewhere. The film finishes at the water’s edge, a place which marks an ending for some and departure point for others.