Birdsong (Solo Exhibition including 2 new major film installations and 30 drawings)

Major solo exhibition, newly commissioned by: inIVA (London); Film and Video Umbrella (London); ACE; The Culture Company, Harewood House; The Cooley Gallery, USA ; Angel Row Gallery (Nottingham); AHRC; CCAD.

Commissioned works: ‘Magnesium Bird’ (16mm film, single-screen projection, 9 minutes 27 seconds); ‘Birdsong’ (16mm film, double-screen projection, 7 minutes 7 seconds); thirty drawings, ‘Untitled (trading cards)’.

Drawing from various texts, including: F.Fanon; J.Lacan; G.Deleuze; M.Proust; Edward Lear, and inspired by my interest in poetry and literature, the symbolic context of ‘heritage sites’ (UK) became key to this exhibition. Through the personal, these works collectively explored subjectivity, race and gender in relation to narrative cinema and the historical, still / pictorial image, ‘displacing’/ challenging established views. ‘Magnesium Bird’, was filmed in the Victorian walled-gardens at Harewood House, a heritage site (where this film was also exhibited alongside drawings by J.W.Turner and E.Lear). ‘Birdsong’, is a film tableau in which the domestic interior, dressed with many of the same artefacts as used by English Heritage in advertising paint-swatches, drew from an English lanscape-genre painting by George Stubbs (c.1759). The drawings were hung in the gallery entrance - an “anti-chamber”. Resembling collected museum artefacts, they reference ‘exotic’ trading cards found free in packets of English tea, circa 1970.

• http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17204.htm