| "Nothing Lovelier can be found, In Woman, than to study household good."
Milton, Paradise Lost
My work archives the 'home' and acts as a document of the tensions between private and public space. The process used to create the work is a concentrated and systematic survey reliant on random reflections and thoughts as much as disciplined observation. Still-rooms consists a set of three pieces; Floors, Walls and Ceilings.
Floors
Our houses are usually described in terms of cubic space, floor plans and room dimensions. When making this work, the idea was to find an alternative way of describing this space so that it creates a photographic map which becomes an archive of the activities and history of the home. The piece becomes a memorial to this.
Walls
Within this film, the camera is marking territory. In a primitive way - checking to ensure the home is safe and secure. There is a perception that it is the woman's responsibility to perform this daily ritual of defending territory.
Filmed as a diptych, the camera moves through the home, creating both a physical and emotion layout of the house's structure. The split screen plays resonating forward movement with reverse action, indicating the history as well as the immediate present and future histories of the house.
Jacqueline Butler is Programme Leader on BA(Hons) Photography and is a lecturer on MA Media Arts at MMU; her research interests are in the representation of places and spaces defined as location of the female. Exploring a deconstruction of conventional narrative structures and considering how the 'edit' effects the concept of story telling. | |
