The Trackless Way

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From the original Festival website: I am presently working on a new installation. The nature of the subject is that of physical frailty and mortality. This is partly inspired by my own relatively recent personal experiences but also by a desire to explore the wider field of universal fears and phobias. The proposed piece describes the visionary journey of an abstract body, threatened, invaded and traumatised, finding itself within a Bosch-inspired, modern world of medical and technological nightmares, within imagined landscapes and inhabited by predatory fauna. In producing the images required, I intend using a combination of two techniques. The first will be a camera fixed underneath a heavy glass platform pointing upwards. A series of standing, bent and crouching bodies will be filmed, in a wide range of gestures, movements and actions. Using varying lighting, and manipulating both focal length and depth of field, the images will be distorted and foreshortened. The resulting images will then be densely overlaid with further images in order to create grotesque and hybrid identities. The second technique will make use of the method of ‘glass painting’, particularly as it was used in early movie-making. Here, detailed and fantastical landscapes will be painted onto selected areas of large sheets of glass. The camera will then film sequences through the clear sections of the glass, merging them with the painted landscapes. The actual installation will be the combination of the products of both these processes, where the deliberately ethereal illusions and vagaries of the glass painted screens will contrast with the visceral nature of bodies filmed in close-up detail. Roberta M Graham was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1954.  Since her earliest work, she has been involved in exploring the violent relationship between the human body and the world.  Working in various media – photography, video, slide/tape, performance, installation – she has exhibited extensively, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Berlin Film Festival, the Hayward Gallery, Liverpool Tate Gallery, the Barbican, Manchester City Art Gallery, Arnolfini Bristol, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and the Midland Group (4 Days…1984), Nottingham. Apart from private collections, work by Roberta M Graham is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum, Arts Council England and the Australian Arts Council. ravenslea.com