Synopsis: ‘She couldn’t recollect so we filled her with memories’
Through her experimental poetic video ‘She couldn’t recollect so we filled her with memories’, Karen Heald explores the ‘semiotic chora’ (as defined by Julia Kristeva), in an attemptto create work that alludes to a ‘transitory otherness’. This is a term that Heald coins, to further develop the Kristevan chora as a preverbal space that relates to rhythms, colours and trace, the infant before the use of language, the depressive, the psychotic and the creative. Heald is evolving her concept through the work with patients, as an Artist in Residence, at a National Health Service, Psychiatric Hospital in the UK. The video was created at the hospital in response to an individual creative writing workshop with a patient. This poignant experience was the stimulus for Heald’s performance, where she filmed herself filling a small yellow, battery operated truck, used for transporting laundry (which was always situated outside the window of the art room), with hospital sheets as a metaphor for memories. The film was then projected onto a panelled folding hospital screen. This played with the idea of the screen and the anonymity of the patient.
Synopsis: ‘White’
Karen Heald and Susan Liggett’s collaborative video ‘White’ was made in response to their experience of working as Artists in Residence at a National Health Service, Psychiatric Hospital in the UK. During the residency they staged ephemeral events that responded to the site, which were recorded and evidenced by documentation. Often exploring and communicating difficult and personal issues with discreet, implied and conceptual visual stanzas, with the patients; the artists’ performances touched upon personal and universal issues using oblique and subtle metaphors. They wanted the work to operate in the way that offered a non-linear narrative suggestive of communicating more purely through a visual, poetic language, which was emotional, instinctive and semiotic as opposed to symbolic. It was filmed in the form of a triptych with subtle, quiet actions occurring within the mise-en-scene. Sound whilst at times heightened in sensitivity, was generally low in volume, the sensitivity arising from the inner core of listening, of ruminating. The pace of the video was slowed down and dependent on the action being undertaken. The work was characterised by the evocative juxtaposition of incongruous images in an attempt to access the unconscious dream elements. Repetition and reverie were keys to unravelling the work, which documented the ‘everydayness’ of the acts in relation to time. This dream like quality invites the audience to enter simultaneous time zones.
