reflections
December 2023
This video is the result of many months of gathering images, making sounds and putting both together as part of an artistic practice – letting the narrative or the guiding images emerge while filming, writing, singing, and editing.
I was initially interested in the reflectivity of mirrors and how they could be considered personas in themselves. I began to see mirrors as bodies holding the bodies that they reflected, gathering all those many people who passed by, holding the light as it changed, the steadfast tree, and the moving clouds. Yet mirrors also let these bodies go. They hold and release again and again, each time differently.
I related this sense of holding and letting go to the sensation I have with my children; a pulling and releasing like an ebb and flow, continuous and unending. This holding contains a fierceness that does not subside; the letting go is never complete. Bodies are stretched like strings or vocal cords that get thinner as they move apart.
I looked at mirrors as complex bodies, that have gone through many processes beginning as rock, then, through watery erosions, becoming sand and finally melted into glass. Water and glass are synonymous; their reflective surfaces are repetitions, doubling what is there, again and again. I’m very inspired by Astrid Neimanis’ book, “Bodies of Water”, and I wrote a response to a few of her paragraphs, playing with the overlapping and repetition of water and the impossibility and inevitability of letting go.
The mirror holds a figure, holds a moment, holds the holding. Then, it lets them go.
Spoken text from the video:
A reflection, a gestation, a holding while becoming. The lines and separations between bodies are virtual. The flowing is between. The maternal is relevant and permeable. The fierceness of holding will at some point weaken. There is nothing more insistent than the desire to converge with multiple other selves.
It will bear itself, it will be born, trespassing permeable mineral membranes to merge this time differently. The watery flow of emotions, the tempest of tears, the waves that release themselves onto the shore, the sand, the glass. You repeat and repeat, you repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat…