On Shadow (2019)

Shadow is a performance/film/painting/time collage I created in 2019 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

It was a continuation of my exploration/research re: Eurydice.

A lot of my paintings and drawings are about channeling an inner voice that I am too afraid to let out through my mouthβ€”so it comes out through color, gesture, and form, instead.

This was the case with this piece. It first began as a series of three watercolors (which I much later decided to call β€œDivine Feminine,” β€œWounded Feminine,” and
”Integrated Masculine.”)

These watercolor pieces turned into a series of three short video collages, in which each painting opened out into the adventures of a shadow figure, scaling the walls and sites of the city. Tbilisi felt haunted for me by a sleeping Goddess; in the city’s public sculptures the female form is on display in a less apologetic and somehow more reverent way than I was used to at home, and this helped me along my way as I felt around for some kind of re-emergence of a lost Feminine or a way for my own body to be the material expression of something spiritual (I am still making room for this in my life, it’s ongoing).

The shadow films eventually became another collaged projection in London - I stood in front of the shadow films projected onto the back wall, performing and playing with my own live shadow cast onto the enlarged projections.

I filmed this performance and created a new video out of it. For the soundtrack, I used a song I had just written called Oranges, which references male biblical figures and is about the experience of living as a female body in patriarchy.

On my mind at the time, as I built up all these layers of secret form, shadow, and emergent voice, was Eric Neumann’s line about poetry. He wrote that it had the ability to β€œshake off the disguise imposed on myth by time…so it can emerge again in its original form from the primordial font of myth.” I have noticed a thread through a lot of my work now - this messy, improvised amalgamation or layering of a discordant menagerie of mythical archetypes.

Neumann’s line stuck with me when I made my Eurydicean poem-play later that year.