An Island Beneath the Sea
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Dates2022 - Ongoing
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Author
- Location Melbourne, Australia
A woman awakes in an unfamiliar landscape. A mirror of rock and sea, a shell swept up offers its secret. She steps through a portal and swims across to a body of land beneath the waves. A watery underworld; a reflection of her own interior.
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'An Island Beneath the Sea' is a mythopoetic narrative conjured in analogue photography and moving image. My inspirations swim between Haitian myth and ritual, theories of surrealism and psychoanalysis, the film works of Maya Deren and research into ‘hydro-feminism’ (a theory coined by Astrida Neimanis).
This is part of an ongoing body of work responding to our intrinsic connection to other-than-human worlds, as well as interconnections between our bodies, minds and elements of water. I believe the camera is an effective device for presenting new ways of looking and feeling, for what I have termed the ‘oceanic unconscious’.
This project is made in collaboration with writer and poet Manisha Anjali; a specialist in dreams, visions and hallucinations. Manisha is both the model for this project and has contributed her spoken word poetics in response to the visuals. This developing project comprises of analogue 35mm, medium format and super-8 moving image.
