Birdsong (film installation)

'Birdsong' is a double-screen film installation, shot on 16mm film and transferred to DVD.

‘Birdsong’ questions narrative structure in the cinematic context, engaging with time, desire, subjectivity, feminism and cultural identity. Using the collective memory of childhood as a tool by which to enter into the space of this film-work, ‘Birdsong’ questions the relationship between the subject and history, challenging the familiar and unsettling /subverting our usual expectations.

Based on a conversation with my son, who at eighteen months expressed his desire to have a horse living with us in our home, and who appears in and is central to the film, the context for this work also references historical British landscape genre paintings; specifically ‘Henry Fox and the Earl of Albermarle Shooting at Goodwood’ (George Stubbs, c.1759) depicting the aristocracy at play / hunting, attended by his male black servant.

‘Birdsong’ draws on texts by Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Marcel Proust and Edward Lear; also films by Jean Cocteau and Federico Fellini.

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