Within Sue de Beer’s 2006 work The Quickening (de Beer, 2006), I find two particular aspects that have had a clear influence on where I’m headed with my current degree show work. The most obvious is perhaps the gallery installation for the film itself: its large scale set pieces that the audience enters in order to view the film, creating an immersive space that viewers become a part of, as if being onlookers within the film itself, and the second aspect being the interesting contrast between the foreboding, tense atmosphere and the stillness and slow pacing of the film.

Another strong part of the film is the lack of didactic narration: the plot is muddied and unclear, open for interpretation. As with Chloé Piene’s Blackmouth (Piene, 2004), our individual interpretations of the film will be coloured by our own experiences, our own interests, and our own aesthetic sensibilities. In his February 2007 review in Art Forum, David Valesco describes the plot of The Quickening as “less a motor for character development than elaborate window dressing for the artist’s dense referential games” (Valesco, 2007), which I find interesting and open rather than obscure and impenetrable. This ‘openness’ is perhaps related to how the film seems to inhabit both technical professionalism while maintaining aspects of the DIY: the shaky, handheld camera footage and the sound bleed of the outside world (a siren can be heard going by at one point, and the decision to keep it in the final edit is feels fresh and deliberate rather than amateurish and distracting).

I had aimed to play with this contrast of technical competence by having the grainy, noisy footage of the Woman in the Woods juxtaposed against the high definition footage I had taken of the hands bandaging the clay in the floor video. Unfortunately, I had to compromise the quality of the latter video significantly in order to make its file size playable on the screens used.