Description
The video Playpoem Verse IV opens with an overhead close-up view of red earth. A left hand pushes dirt away to make a small trench for the arm and hand and settles in this resting place. The right hand reaches over to cover the arm with earth. The right hand then pushes dirt away to make a trench for it and settles in it. The left hand comes out of the earth to cover the right arm. The process repeats several times and ends with both hands pulling dirt towards the bottom of the frame, leaving two empty rows in the earth.
Statement
Playpoem IV is part of a series of videos and performances inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Published in 1931, she called it her “play-poem”. In these works, I imagine myself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with bodies of text, hands, the tide, the repetitiveness of waves, the ocean and the land. This thought guided the making of these works during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton and Mount Allison University, Sackville in New Brunswick. In this particular work I was repeating actions without caring or understanding why, a kind of embracing of the absurd, to just enjoy it. The flies were obsessive. I was also thinking of the works of Samuel Beckett.