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THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS

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THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS

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At what point does trauma become art? At what point does my trauma and my experience become my art? How close to the boundary of art and trauma can I be? I must NOT "trauma dump", it turns the viewer away. There is a specific point in art where I feel as if something gets too explicit and unsubtle that it becomes boring again. I must achieve this balance. I must not trigger anyone in my work. I must not be overtly specific. I must not feel sorry for myself, or make it so that the audience feels sad for me. that must not happen.

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Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.

You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.

I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.

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I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!

‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?’

The wind under the door.

‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

Nothing again nothing.

‘Do

‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

‘Nothing?’

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’

‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

‘What shall we ever do?’

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

'Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smooths her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

‘Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’

‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’

I made no comment. What should I resent?’

‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.’

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih     shantih     shantih

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3.How does this subject area relate to the bigger picture of your own area of expertise? Have you explored similar concepts before? Talk about a project(s) you have done in specialism that is relevant either conceptually or technically. Which mediums, techniques, materials that you have mastered on the course so far could you utilise in your FMP?

I have touched upon my own trauma in my work and began looking into my own trauma and my mother in my work, however I want to refine this and focus more specifically and do wider research. I am enjoying using text in my work, and therefore would like to continue that through the FMP, because even though text and language, primarily, is a form of direct communication, I have found it successful to manipulate text and language in order to choose what and when I reveal and hide about myself in my work. My work previously has been relevant conceptually, but I think I want to explore different mediums in my work, for example cyanotype and projections of light. Previously, I have used blank screens on monitors with text, but I think I want to expand that.

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2.Contextually reference your subject matter.What art, design, cultural, historic references

Can you look at to gain insight? Describe them and why they are relevant.

I would like to look at movements in art, literature and music which have all evolved and stemmed from mass trauma; modernism arose after the collective trauma of the first and second world wars, when ‘mass industrialised death’ was first experienced on a global scale. I would like to see how this relates back to the modern day and contemporaries, on a macro and micro scale. Examples of recent traumas on a macroscale are things such as The Pandemic, The Cost of Living and other events which spurred on movements such as the Me Too movement. Furthermore, I would like to look more into the works of Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci and other performance artists, because even though I don’t think I will necessarily go down the route of performance art using my body, I am interested in my work having a performative element to it; I don’t think I want my work to be static. I don’t know if that will be in a time-based element or by using film or moving image, but I know that I am interested in creating more performative pieces of work. I am also interested in the genre of dystopia in primarily art and literature, but also music, as through the dystopian genre, you can often figure more about the world (primarily, what the main public fears, concerns and problems are) from the time it was created than you can about the future. Furthermore, I would like to look at artists who use text in their practice, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Lalla Essaydi, Wang Guangyi, Barbara Kruger, Mark Bradford, Mason Hefner and Richie Culver. In Culver’s work, I really like how he uses text in such a gestural way, with slanted lines and a very specific style of writing letters, which feels almost childish. In some of his text work, it feels like he’s trying to shout at the viewer in almost sort of a sulky/patronising/antagonising way, trying to get people to almost pointlessly wake up. For example, “WORK HARDER/ WORKING CLASS”, “DON’T FORGET TO CLAP WHEN THE TRAIN LANDS”, “HUGE FAN OF YOUR OLD STUFF” and “DON’T GO CHASING WATERFALLS/ CHASE MONEY”. Furthermore, I really like Tracey Emin’s use of text in her work (especially in her monoprint series), with work including text such as “something’s wrong”, “everybody’s been there”, “The last great action”, and finally “if everything you say is true, then you know how much I love you/ You must know how afraid I I am. Because I will believe what you say. Because I trust you. I wonder if this will ever change/ I dont think so/ I think I am trapped till I di/ I am getting old now/ but now as old as my broken fucked up vagina thats so connected to my soul- the end of me the little girl that had to grow up too fast. The part of me I so much protect is my memory. And that has made me survive. That has made me. There is no other me. I am the last of my kind”.

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1.Introduce your chosen subject area.What Interests As potential starting points or

Areas of research?What Influenced This Choice?

For my Final Major Project, I am aiming to further explore the question ‘what is trauma and what is art’; to what extent and at what point does my trauma and my personal life, happenings and memory become my art. In this, I would like to explore the relationships I have with people, more specifically, as a starting focus, my mother, as well as the relationship I have with myself. I am also interested in pushing the boundaries between what is considered ‘art’ and what is not, as well as pushing audiences and viewers to a level of uncomfortability, which I would like to explore. I would like to research the extent to which so little can be done, but still hold and consume the viewers attention, and the balance which needs to be found in order to uphold viewer attention. I have found a couple of theses on trauma in contemporary art which I am going to read as the starting points of my research to build a basis and understanding of works and theories which already exist within my chosen subject area. I would like to look deeper into my relationship with myself (past present and future), but also experimenting with different ways in which I conceal and reveal, and what I hide and show to an audience. Currently, I have started to become more interested in relational aesthetics, and so for another starting point of my research I would like to read the book by Nicolas Bouriard on ‘Relational Aesthetics’ to look into ways I can aim to incorporate these ideas into my work. I am aiming for aesthetics in my work, but not necessarily in a primarily seeing sense; as anesthetic means to stop feeling, I would like to make people feel in my work.

Alternatively, I am also deeply interested in modernism and the theory and histories of modernism, so I would also like to perhaps look at how happenings in the world create backlash movements such as modernism within art, literature and music and look to how that is happening in the contemporary world on a macro and micro scale. Within modernism I’m more specifically interested in the works of T.S. Eliot, Stravinsky, Henry Moore, Babara Hepworth and Louise Bourgeois, with works such as The Waste Land, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. There is a quote from the very end of The Waste Land which I may explore, which says “These fragments I have shored against my ruins //Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.//Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.//Shantih     shantih     shantih”. I am really interested, in relation specifically to my memory, of “fragments” that have been “shored against my ruins”; I really like the metaphorical language which I feel evokes a powerful image through language.

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Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body

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I liked that the two tree like sculptures moved back and forth very slowly, so that for the first time watching them, you weren't fully sure if they were actually moving, or it was your brain. Very subtle and worked very well

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Really loved that the faces, hands and feet were solid, but the body of the sculpture

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the immersive audio made me FEEL, as did the fact that when you had on the headphones, you were meant to be on these copper plates which acted as a form of 'dancefloor'

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Liked that it wasn't static

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Really liked the sculptures, HATED the drawings on the gallery wall which accompanied them

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Found this, as a standalone piece by itself, very funny

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Harold Offeh
(Had Taylor collerige music on in the film which I liked)

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MK Gallery

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Collaborative project surrounding the celebratory grief of the loss of childhood.
Perfromarmance//Live art

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South London Gallery, New Contemporaries exhibition

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End to continual cycles of exhaustion

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Perhaps it's a Stomach Ulcer Due to Repressed Childhood Trauma

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Piece from the New Contemporaries at the South London Gallery. I really like the way it was installed, with pieces hanging and drooped across the floor

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Piece from the new contemporaries exhibition at the south London gallery, which talked as if it was a friend reminiscing on memories of their grandmother towards the end of her life, ending on two verses of a poem.
Scroll mounted onto the wall and spilling onto the floor

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"Perhaps it's a Stomach Ulcer Due to Repressed Childhood Trauma"
Title of a piece in the New Contemporaries Exhibition at the South London Gallery

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ouKMTjTYi_eyWphHhQ9JnBtVYkG-NhMIrUUK5M16SzQ/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w7rVJ_HXDlEJbsf8muPFPbQQP9ZQfuo57cvavvh17GQ/edit?usp=sharing

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The breakdown of relationships in The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot and Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimmimanda Ngozi Adichie

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LlXv3R4ES3hfWAQYnwFX4QgK0pvDiGUU6Adtf1V_Zfk/edit?usp=sharing

Modernism and the breakdown of relationships in literature

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Sometimes I feel beautiful 2000

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Red fluorescent e.coli colonies on germ microbiomes, love and desire

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https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jeff-mermelstein-secret-text-message-photos-1894914

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You can tell a lot about people from their text messages. Just ask Jeff Mermelstein, a master of modern-day street photography who, for the past three years, has been surreptitiously snapping pictures of New Yorkers' phone screens on his own iPhone.

After living mostly on his Instagram account, Mermelstein's images of adroit texters have now been collected into , a new photo book published by that is at turns profound and provocative, hilarious and just plain bizarre.

The project reads less like a photo book than it does an epistolary novel. All the timeless themes of a great work of fiction are there-humor, heartbreak, pathos, love-often wrapped up in the mundane, inelegant conversations that constitute our workaday lives. There's discussions about Venmo etiquette, Whole Foods leftovers, the code for peeing in a Starbucks.

Other times, drama is laid bare. We look on as friends talk about abortions and unplanned pregnancies. Couples break up and new lovers exchange sexts that'll make you blush. One person, writing in all caps, declares to their cancer-ridden friend that they would do anything to get rid of their pain and suffering.

"I'm not even sure if it's a photography book," Mermelstein tells Artnet News, describing his project's literary qualities. "In a way, I don't care. That's very exciting to me."

Mermelstein amassed more than 1,200 text photos since beginning the series in 2018. The final book features over 150, and they're all printed on blue paper that mimics the backlit glow of a screen.

Taken by the stories playing out in the pictures, it's easy to get lured into a false sense of omniscience. But just as quickly, a particularly personal or lascivious exchange will jolt you back to an awareness of the voyeurism at play: Should we be looking at these photographs?

The ethics of candid street photography are as hotly contested as they've ever been, and Mermelstein's pictures add another layer of complexity. The texters may be in the public domain, but is the content of their screens? At the very least, the mental image of the photographer standing behind-and, by his own admission, quite close to-his subjects is a hard one to reconcile.

Indeed, for Mermelstein, who has been photographing in public for four decades now, there was some moral math that needed sorting out.

"It was new turf for me," says Mermelstein. "And it was a turf that I needed to address and be able to work in."

So he turned to the first tool in the photographer's kit: The crop. As a rule, he included no faces, no surnames-nothing that might suggest, even by implication, a person's identity. "Even if I'm on perfect legal ground, I still wanted to try, as best I could, to maintain a sense of anonymity," he says.

In terms of context clues, what we're left with is arguably more interesting: dangling cigarettes, elaborate nail art, screens that look like they were rolled over by a truck-details of character, not identity.

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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A Photographer Secretly Snapped Shots of New Yorkers' Text Messages. See the Humorous and Heartbreaking Images Here

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You can tell a lot about people from their text messages. Just ask Jeff Mermelstein, a master of modern-day street photography who, for the past three years, has been surreptitiously snapping pictures of New Yorkers' phone screens on his own iPhone.

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https://andysahlstrom.com/design/kids-toys-adult-issues
Kids toys, Adults issues
Series of sculptures by Andy Sahlstrom

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Andy Sahlstrom's Website - Interactive Technologist, Kinetic Artist, and Inventor

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http://www.thevisualist.org/2023/02/sweet-16-16-years-of-geoffrey-todd-smith-at-western-exhibitions-2/

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(northern) Western Exhibitions is thrilled to announce a retrospective of Miller & Shellabarger's photographic work at our second location in Skokie, Illinois. Married artist collaborators Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger use self-portraiture, laborious material processes, and considered craftsmanship to meditate on love and death, across a myriad of media.

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https://westernexhibitions.com/artist/miller-shellabarger/

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Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work - performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes - that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. Their performances, always enacted together in public, push simple materials and actions to almost Sisyphean extremes. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, private and public, protection and pain, and visibility and invisibility. Their work is both autobiographical and metaphorical, speaking to common human interaction and queer relationships. Silhouettes of each other, their iconic beards, and their bodies appear regularly in their work. In their signature ongoing performance, "Untitled (Pink Tube)", a non-theatrical, durational piece, they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink acrylic yarn, a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. In "Untitled (Grave)", Miller & Shellabarger dig two holes close together, deep and large enough for each man to lie in. They then dug a small tunnel between the holes that enabled them to hold hands while lying in the graves.

Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University and Gallery Diet in Miami and they have performed and/or been exhibited in group shows across the North America. Miller & Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work in is the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Newark Public Library, Indiana University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Their Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They are represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicagoand live and work in Chicago.

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Miller & Shellabarger - Western Exhibitions

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Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work - performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes - that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities.

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https://open.spotify.com/playlist/22hJNzahimHGiWIKjNbR9P?si=541d13e6bbe342c2

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https://open.spotify.com/album/0vNFnxtyjMNqQ17H22ym7x?si=NncetuT0S4KxbvnI4V1-2A

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https://open.spotify.com/album/6Kw2JUWZcVEQPIkiTg9y8j?si=qrk1HKKTT4SBGA4Y-MOFyA

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Stravinsky: Petrouchka; Le Sacre du Printemps

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Stravinsky: Petrouchka; Le Sacre du Printemps

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https://open.spotify.com/track/2DmlTLFphBLAIACKPsLAQH?si=d5f550e625e5465b

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Pavane pour une infante défunte, M. 19 (Version for Orchestra)

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Pavane pour une infante défunte, M. 19 (Version for Orchestra)

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https://open.spotify.com/album/23xYi00HPUXFzNI9oP06lw?si=dyAXoo35TvSDD3181DirFQ

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Stravinsky: Firebird (The) / Petrushka / Suites Nos. 1 and 2

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Stravinsky: Firebird (The) / Petrushka / Suites Nos. 1 and 2

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https://open.spotify.com/album/3vuTybHZ2aNPdyULoC7On2?si=T0xO6Np6SKmdkKZlHl_lVg

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https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5BrIGJj4TCiw8eEmdgUfBF?si=c303c96d993f46a6

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Mahler's 5th symphony

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https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/mona-hatoum

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Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum settled in England in 1975. Her work creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities, often making the familiar uncanny. Through the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, she engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.

Immerse yourself in the work of one of the most important artists working today.

Mona Hatoum

Impenetrable 2009

© Mona Hatoum Florian Kleinefenn Courtesy of the artist Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Mona Hatoum

Over my dead body 1988-2002

©Mona Hatoum. Courtesy White Cube

Mona Hatoum

Hot Spot III 2009

©Mona Hatoum

Photo: Agostino Osio

Courtesy Fondazione Querini Olnus, Venice

Exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in collaboration with Tate Modern and Finnish National Gallery / the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki

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Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum settled in England in 1975. Her work creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities, often making the familiar uncanny. Through the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, she engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hatoum-measures-of-distance-t07538

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Measures of Distance is a video work comprising several layered elements. Letters written by Hatoum's mother in Beirut to her daughter in London appear as Arabic text moving over the screen and are read aloud in English by Hatoum. The background images are slides of Hatoum's mother in the shower, taken by the artist during a visit to Lebanon. Taped conversations in Arabic between mother and daughter, in which her mother speaks openly about her feelings, her sexuality and her husband's objections to Hatoum's intimate observation of her mother's naked body are intercut with Hatoum's voice in English reading the letters.

Hatoum was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and became an exile in Britain, during a short visit to London, when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. She attended art schools in London (Byam Shaw School of Art 1975-9, Slade School of Art 1979-81), where her experience of cultural displacement, both as a woman and an Arab national, informed much of her practice. She made Measures of Distance in Vancouver during a year as artist-in-residence at Western Front Art Centre. It is a Western Front production. Hatoum has said:

Although the main thing that comes across is a very close and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war. In this work I was also trying to go against the fixed identity that is usually implied in the stereotype of Arab woman as passive, mother as non-sexual being ... the work is constructed visually in such a way that every frame speaks of literal closeness and implied distance.
(Quoted in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140).

In the video the decorative Arabic script of Hatoum's mother's letters floats over the images of her body like a veil or barbed wire, preventing total visual access to the image. It both conceals and reveals the woman inhabiting that body, explicating her as an active thinking and feeling being, an image which is emphasised by the frank conversation about her sexuality with her daughter. The Arabic and English parts of the sound-track have been given equal emphasis, 'creating a difficult and alienating situation for a Western audience who have to strain to follow the ' (Hatoum in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140). The work evokes a strong sense of intimacy between a mother and daughter and suggests a creative and transformative relationship through the breaking of taboos around the maternal body. It is through the daughter's art-making project that the mother is able to present herself freely, in a form which cements a bond of identity independent of colonial and patriarchal concerns.

Further reading:
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Milan 1999, pp.11-12
Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, London 1997, pp.13-14, 53, 56, 96, 138, 140-1, reproduced (colour) p.54-5, 96
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol 1993, p.22, reproduced (colour) p.29

Elizabeth Manchester
February 2000
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Measures of Distance', Mona Hatoum, 1988 | Tate

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'Measures of Distance', Mona Hatoum, 1988 on display at Tate Liverpool.

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Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children, 1998

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Why I never became a dancer
https://vimeo.com/79687251

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Somethings wrong

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Tracey Emin's Book "Strangeland" was written as if it was a painting. As deeply interesting as it was uncomfortable

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https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000002840078/timestalks-marina-abramovic-preview.html?action=click&module=video-series-bar&region=header&pgtype=Article&playlistId=video/times-talks-marina-abramovic

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Video: TimesTalks | Marina Abramovic: Preview

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The celebrated performance artist discusses her long career and talks about her new and upcoming projects.

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https://www.healing-power-of-art.org/positive-art-news-for-the-week-june-15/

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For most of us our environment is generally nurturing and positive, but for some, it can be traumatic, such as experiencing horrific events in war zones or being raised in an abusive home. Art is often the healing balm that soothes these harsh realities, as well as provides long term benefits. This article is about using art to deal with trauma.

You'll read about Marina Abramović, an artist who turned her abusive childhood years into a rewarding art profession, an art therapy program that uses mask-making to help veterans deal with their trauma, and introduces you to an interior designer in New York City who is combining traditional Feng Shui with ecology and the healing power of nature to enhance indoor environments. And, you'll find links to more articles on this website. I hope whatever you're seeking, this article opens many possibilities and solutions for you.

Marina Abramović's Harrowing Childhood Became the Raw Material for Her Art
Marina Abramović turned her traumatic childhood into creative power. In an article by Maria Popova Marina Abramović revealed how she was raised in a home of severe control, discipline, and violence. She suffered from her mother's continuous punishment. She was forced to spend time alone, isolated from other children. However, in spite of these harsh conditions, Abramović began to harness her innate creativity. When she was only three years old she began drawing daily. Popova wrote: "Drawing became a lens through which she saw and understood the world." Her story is told in Getting There: A Book of Mentors by Gillian Zoe Segal. Abramović is quoted as saying, "You know you are an artist if you have to do art - it's like breathing and you have no choice. Nothing should be able to stop you."
You may also want to read a related article "Personal Healing Through Artistic Expression".
Mask-Making As Art Therapy for Veterans
Melissa Walker is an art therapist who works with veterans to help them heal from the trauma and wounds of war that has left hundreds of thousands of soldiers with seizures, sleep disorders, and memory and cognitive difficulties. She guides them through mask-making in a program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

In an interview in National Geographic magazine Walker said, "With all the returning injured service men and women, we needed to look for additional types of treatment. I had already used the masks in an inpatient unit, and when I came here, it dawned on me I could implement that here. After a very short time, it became clear [they] were taking to art therapy."
You may also want to read a related article "What Is Art Therapy?".
Feng Shui. Eco Shui and Green Practices in Interior Design
Our environment can transform our stressful lives significantly. Feng Shui is an art form that follows a specific arrangement in an environment so that it has a positive effect on the people inside a space.

Debra Duneier is a Feng Shui Master Practitioner, an accredited LEED® Green Associate, Certified Eco-Designer, and a New York State licensed real estate broker. She is also the creator of the EcoChi® system of design and the award winning author of EcoChi: Designing the Human Experience. She states, "We are on the forefront of Environmental Sustainability with an innovative approach that meticulously blends green practices with environmental psychology and classical feng shui."

EcoChi is based on a fundamental truth that people feel best when they are connected to nature. When nature is brought indoors, such as green living walls, attentiveness increases and a sense of calmness prevails. Nature environments also lower pulse rate and blood pressure and increase white blood cells.
You may also want to read a related article "Photographic Art in Hospitals Aids The Healing Process". Are you an artist who wants your art to be placed in healthcare venues? Read "The Healthcare Art Market Needs Art".

PLEASE SHARE

by

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For most of us our environment is generally nurturing and positive, but for some, it can be traumatic, such as experiencing horrific events in war zones or being raised in an abusive home. Art is often the healing balm that soothes these harsh realities, as well as provides long term benefits.

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https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/04/27/getting-there-marina-abramovic-interview/

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Let's get one thing out of the way: Although creative history is littered with tortured geniuses who survived terrible childhoods full of abuse and violence - take Franz Kafka's abusive father or Maya Angelou's rape or Eve Ensler's trauma - and although my own early years contain elements of these experiences (sans the subsequent genius), I am not one who romanticizes pain, upheaval, and adversity as prerequisites for success. That said, I do find tremendous value in reading about celebrated creators who persevered through traumatic childhoods - first, because to anyone who has ever been stymied by crushing circumstances, these stories offer assurance that it is possible to have a deeply fulfilling life despite the cards one has been dealt; secondly, because these personal accounts yank into question the privilege narrative of our almost automatic assumption that those who have attained public recognition and its capitalist byproduct of financial success must be living charmed, untroubled lives. These stories are, above all, a sometimes jarring, sometimes gentle reminder to heed the words of 19th-century Scottish writer and theologian Ian Maclaren (often misattributed to Plato): "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

This is why I found myself at once deeply moved and hugely heartened by artist Marina Abramović's contribution to Getting There: A Book of Mentors (public library) - a stimulating compendium by lawyer, photographer, and writer Gillian Zoe Segal, illustrating the notion that "success comes in a potpourri of flavors" through a tasting menu of wildly diverse success-stories by such cultural icons as inventor Craig Venter, mayor extraordinaire Mike Bloomberg, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, composer Hans Zimmer, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, and billionaire-philanthropist Warren Buffet. (I'd be remiss not to point out that only a quarter of these featured success-models are women and only one is a person of color - a fact stated not as self-righteous criticism, for I did enjoy the volume, but as an unrelenting reminder that we can and, in fact, must do better if we are to have a truly diverse and inclusive cultural rhetoric of success.)

Abramović was born in Belgrade in 1946, shortly after the end of WWII. Her formative years, while heartbreaking, are not entirely unusual for those of us raised in Eastern Europe - while Abramović's experience is undoubtedly a function of her parents' particular personalities, it also reflects more general cultural pathologies related to discipline and the chronic denial of emotional reality. She recounts:

My parents were both partisans and national heroes. They were very hard-core and were so busy with their careers that I lived with my grandmother until I was six. Until then, I hardly even knew who my parents were. They were just two strange people who would visit on Saturdays and bring presents. When I was six, my brother was born, and I was sent back to my parents. From that point on, my childhood was very unhappy. I grew up with incredible control, discipline, and violence at home. Everything was extreme. My mother never kissed me. When I asked why, she said, "Not to spoil you, of course." She had a bacteria phobia so she didn't allow me to play with other children out of fear that I might catch a disease. She even washed bananas with detergent. I spent most of my time alone in my room. There were many, many rules. Everything had to be in perfect order. If I slept messily in bed, my mother would wake me in the middle of the night and order me to sleep straight.

Illustrating just how reality-warping such parenting is and how hungry for affectionate care such systematic deprivation leaves the child, Abramović relays the reverse reaction she had to an experience most children would find utterly distressing:

When one of my baby teeth fell out and the bleeding wouldn't stop, everyone thought I might have hemophilia so I was put in the hospital for a year. That was the happiest, most wonderful time of my life. Everybody was taking care of me and nobody was punishing me. I never felt at home in my own home and I never feel at home anywhere.

And yet under these harsh conditions, Abramović had no choice but to cultivate a skill fundamental for creativity - that vital capacity for "fertile solitude" and ability to do nothing all alone with oneself.

Isolated from other children and condemned to forced aloneness, she began drawing daily - one of the few activities her mother supported - when she was only three. Drawing became a lens through which she saw and understood the world. She relays one particularly formative experience:

One day I was lying on the ground looking up and a few supersonic planes flew over me and made these incredible lines, like drawings. I watched them appear, form, then disappear; and then the sky was blue again. It was incredible. I immediately went to the military base and asked friends of my father's if they could give me twelve supersonic planes to make a drawing in the sky. They called my father and said, "Get your daughter out of here. She is completely nuts!" But after that, I never went to the studio again. It was almost like a spiritual experience, and I realized that I could make art from practically nothing. I could use water, fire, earth, wind, myself. It's the concept that matters. This was the beginning of performance for me.

Her first steps in performance - something that wasn't considered a form of art at the time - were often public stumbles. But despite frequent ridicule and criticism from the press, she continued to push her physical and mental limits, putting on provocative performances that challenged our core assumptions about what art is supposed to be. (As Neil Gaiman urged in his fantastic commencement address on courage and the creative life: "When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art... IRS on your trail - make good art. Cat exploded - make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before - make good art.")

Meanwhile, already well into her twenties, Abramović was still living with her parents and was still being constantly punished by her mother, who continued to beat her and even burned art she made. In a sentiment painfully familiar to those who come from similar circumstances and cultures, Abramović reflects:

It never even crossed my mind to leave. At the time there was really no other choice. Several generations in the same house was how people lived in Eastern Europe.

And then something literally life-changing happened: On her twenty-ninth birthday, Abramović received an invitation to perform on a Dutch television show. She recounts:

When I arrived at the airport in Amsterdam, I was met by another artist, a man named Ulay, who was to be my guide. We discovered that we had the same birthday and much more than that in common. We immediately fell terribly in love. I returned to Belgrade, but we got lovesick and planned to meet in Prague, which is between Amsterdam and Belgrade. We decided we would live together in Amsterdam and work together too. It was one of those magical moments where everything comes together. So at twenty-nine I ran away from home to live with Ulay. I literally escaped. My mother went to the police, told them that I was missing, and gave them a description of me. The police officer said, "But how old is she?" When he learned I was twenty-nine, he made my mother leave.

Invoking Kierkegaard's assertion that "the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes," Abramović considers how deeply the human spirit is imprinted by those early experiences and how challenging it is to inhabit one's freedom once the despot is removed from the picture - something as true politically, for countries newly liberated from dictatorship, as it is personally, for those who break free from abusive relationships:

At first, I had trouble adjusting to my newfound freedom. While on one level I hated and rebelled against all my restrictions in Belgrade, both the political control and my home life, I also fed on them. In Amsterdam I felt the need to create my own restrictions and started building instructions for myself in my performances. To this day, every performance I do is based on discipline and specific instructions that have to be executed in front of the public. It's become the frame I make my work within.

One essential commonality emerges between artists who struggled before finding success. Like Patti Smith, who was homeless and starving for years and yet thought of herself not as a homeless person but as an artist who hasn't yet found her muse, Abramović made no compromises about being a full-time artist:

All I wanted to do was be an artist. I didn't want to work in a restaurant or do any other job, so Ulay and I decided to live together in a van. It was the most radical but also the simplest decision I have ever made. It was really the only way we could exist. We had no money and the performances we did hardly paid. We lived like that for five years and it was bliss!

And yet this ecstatic romance eventually came undone and the couple began to drift apart. The heartbreak of the farewell and its actual performance were commensurate with the magnitude of how their love had begun:

For eight years Ulay and I had been requesting permission to do a performance piece on the Great Wall of China. Our plan was to start at opposite ends, walk toward each other, and get married when we met. By the time the Chinese finally said yes, our relationship was over. I have never been one to give up a good opportunity, so we decided to still walk toward each other but say good-bye instead when we met. It was extremely painful. To make things worse, I knew at the time that Ulay had made his Chinese guide pregnant and would soon be having a child with her.

What began as a fairy-tale romance ended in a nightmare. Abramović was forty and even though she felt "fat, ugly, and unwanted," she had only one choice in order to go on - make good art. She brings the journey full-circle to the determinative experiences of her childhood, attesting to the fact that great artists spend a lifetime making power from their wounds:

When I was growing up, my private life was not valued. The noblest thing one could do in my family was to sacrifice everything for a cause. Art became my cause and it's still everything to me. I dedicate all the energy in my body to my work and have completely sacrificed a more conventional personal life for it. I have no partner and no children, but I'm very proud of myself for always doing what I want, no matter what the cost and no matter how long it's taken... I wake up in the morning with this urge to create; it's almost like I am in a fever. Every single day is structured. I work, work, work, and my curiosity never ends.

With the wry self-awareness of those who have found a way to transmute their vulnerability into art - "Maybe all of our coping mechanisms are our artwork," my dear friend Wendy MacNaughton once said to me - Abramović adds:

I'm also like a clinical case: If you don't get love from your family, you turn to other things to get it. I get the love I need from my audience. Without the public, my performances wouldn't exist because I am not motivated to perform alone. The public completes my work and has become the center of my world.

And yet that public love and its tangible material rewards are - must be - only a byproduct of the private passion driving the artist. Echoing Sherwood Anderson's magnificent letter of life-advice to his son when the young man was headed to art school, Abramović cautions:

When a young artist comes to me and says, "I want to be famous and rich," I ask him to leave because this is not the reason to make art. Those things are just side effects that you may be lucky enough to achieve. Your reason for doing art should be much deeper. You know you are an artist if you have to do art - it's like breathing and you have no choice. Nothing should be able to stop you.

Noting that art is sometimes rejected not because it is bad but because it is "ahead of society" - "the function of the artist in a disturbed society," she has asserted elsewhere, "[is] to ask the right questions, to open consciousness and elevate the mind." - Abramović adds:

The success of an artist is generally measured by how much he can sell his work for, especially in America. This is shocking to me. How can you measure people like that?

Complement Getting There with wisdom on life from the sagest commencement addresses of all time and some timeless resolutions from humanity's greatest mentors, then revisit some of the most celebrated artists of our time - including Abramović herself - on courage, criticism, success, and what it really means to be an artist.

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Turning Trauma into Power: Marina Abramović on How Her Harrowing Childhood Became the Raw Material for Her Art

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"You know you are an artist if you have to do art - it's like breathing and you have no choice. Nothing should be able to stop you."

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https://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/27260/dissertation_jooste_a.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
"Childhood sexual abuse and contemporary trauma theory"

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https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/entertainment/2023/02/26/news/sonia_boyce_on_using_art_to_process_childhood_trauma-3090211/

"Mr close-friend-of-the-family pays a visit whilst everyone else was out"

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https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Lik_L9f1iEcC&oi=fnd&pg=PP13&dq=representation+of+childhood+trauma+in+contemporary+arts&ots=PS0xNnqQwc&sig=30D9wiNGyNPVsmmnvsHooUu1_7o#v=onepage&q=representation%20of%20childhood%20trauma%20in%20contemporary%20arts&f=false

Missing children and the death of childhood

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Photographs of missing children are some of the most haunting images of contemporary Western society. The specter of the child at risk from abduction, abuse, or illness, conjures questions about traumatic loss, protection and the family, nostalgia and childhood innocence. Emma Wilson argues that such questions increasingly return in the work of contemporary filmmakers.

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https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/976349/1/MR63165.pdf

Thesis on 'In the Wake of Trauma:
Representing the Unnameable in Contemporary Art' by Andria Hickey

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https://www.reflectorart.com/jane/index.html
Not too sure on the work that she produces, but I like what she writes about her work and how she talks about her work

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Jane Orleman

The primary focus of my painting process is the exploration of psychological reality through symbolic narrative imagery. Whether painting household interiors, archetypal images or deeply personal feelings, the work expresses my distinctly feminine worldview. This intuitive process, my choice of symbols and colors and the inner world that I explore all combine to express my physical, emotional and spiritual life experiences. Openness to this inner dialogue has created the visual evidence detailing a journey of self-discovery.

View paintings | Self Revealed: A 30-Year Retrospective

Images and excerpts from Telling Secrets | Order a copy of Telling Secrets

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The primary focus of my painting process is the exploration of psychological reality through symbolic narrative imagery. Whether painting household interiors, archetypal images or deeply personal feelings, the work expresses my distinctly feminine worldview. Th…

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Jane Orleman: childhood trauma and the discourse of sexual violence in her art

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2022.2064838

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/29/eyes-wide-shut-review-stanley-kubrick-tom-cruise-nicole-kidman

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yes Wide Shut, now on rerelease, is fascinating, flawed late Stanley Kubrick, his final film before his death in 1999 at the age of 70. It was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, published in 1926 and originally set in Vienna. The film is a tale of sexual obsession among modern-day Manhattan's wealthy and powerful classes and I originally valued it for its satirical potency, formal control and dreamlike self-possession, all of which are bound up in a certain kind of deadpan absurdity and soft-porn seriousness.

Tom Cruise plays Bill Harford, a well-off New York doctor with a fashionable clientele and a magnificent apartment in Central Park West, happily married to beautiful Alice (Nicole Kidman) a former art gallery director, now a stay-at-home mum to their young daughter. (In the book, they are Jewish, an important part of the doctor's alienation. Not here.) Unsettled by each other's flirtatious behaviour at a swell party given by a wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), and by a consumption of champagne and weed, they later have a furious row in which Alice defiantly confesses her lustful thoughts for a certain other man in her past, and Bill then finds himself on a nighttime odyssey, searching for extramarital adventure and gatecrashing a sinister masked orgy, to which he gains admittance by murmuring the (ironic) password "Fidelio".

Ready for anything? Kidman and Cruise. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

This revival comes with a brief documentary short about the film, Never Just a Dream, with interviewees including his longtime collaborator, executive producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan - but not his widow Christiane, and not his most important collaborator, screenwriter Frederic Raphael. It might be time to reissue Raphael's 1999 memoir of working with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, in which Raphael amusingly hints that the tense mood of Cruise's cab ride out to the creepy orgy mansion was inspired by his own minicab journeys from St Albans railway station to the famed seclusion of Kubrick's Hertfordshire country home for script discussions.

The title, Eyes Wide Shut, was Kubrick's, and in my original piece, I wondered whether it related to the idea of imaginary sexual transgression being as potent as real, waking transgressions. In dreams you see and know things clearly, with your eyes wide shut. It's only now that I can see another comparison that was always under my nose: Malcolm McDowell's eyes being clipped wide open in A Clockwork Orange, being forced to watch something horrible. There are other visual echoes, such as the eerie emptiness of the elevator lobbies like those in The Shining - which are part of the film's artificiality and theatricality, mocked a little by the film's denigrators at the time, but a part of the hallucinatory effect. Then there is the party scene at the beginning, like something from The Shining, where Alice meets her predatory Hungarian suitor (Sky du Mont) who could almost be a ghost. Kubrick's use of Stravinsky's Waltz from his Jazz Suite shows his sweet tooth for mainstream classical-music themes, and his predilection for softcore female nudity is a characteristic thought a bit dated in 1999.

Perhaps what we felt was contrived was that orgy scene, although it is disquieting and strange in the Hammer-horror way that originally impressed me. But by 1999, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho had upped the ante on these ideas of Manhattan super-wealth and depravity, and in comparison, Eyes Wide Shut seemed a tad quaint. Yet now, in the age of Epstein, we can see that it was not so far-fetched to imagine elaborate clubs in which the rich and powerful can disport themselves and exploit the vulnerable. What comes across even more strongly about Eyes Wide Shut now is its chilling emphasis on ruling-class secrecy. This film inspired Jonathan Glazer's Birth (2004), itself underappreciated at the time.

Cruise and Kidman heartfelt and fervent performances (although the flickering black-and-white moments showing her imagined sexual indulgence don't work). There are tears, and Cruise in particular lays himself open in that fiercely committed way that he tries everything as an actor. Did their actual marital disputes resemble what happen in this film? Maybe. They were divorced two years after this came out, with much gossip about whether the film had accentuated their discontents. Pollack's performance as Ziegler is thrillingly cynical and disillusioned.

Eyes Wide Shut is released in the UK on 29 November.

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Eyes Wide Shut review - chilling secrecy, quaintly soft-porn sex

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yes Wide Shut, now on rerelease, is fascinating, flawed late Stanley Kubrick, his final film before his death in 1999 at the age of 70. It was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, published in 1926 and originally set in Vienna.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/08/comedy.drama

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Little Miss Sunshine 2006 Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/sep/08/comedy

sad but wholesome film which follows a family dynamic as they take a road trip so that the youngest daughter can take part in a beauty pageant show.

"You can't fly jets if you're colourblind"

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merica's pre-teen beauty pageants: are they grotesque and inappropriate? Or inspirational, aspirational, and generally good, clean fun? After watching this movie, I'm still not sure how directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and screenwriter Michael Arndt would reply. Most people would probably go for answer A, and the whole subject is surely clouded by the ugly unsolved murder, in 1996, of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old child beauty-queen, among whose prizes was something actually called Little Miss Sunburst. You might therefore expect this film - a road-movie of family dysfunction - to offer the darkest black comedy on the market. Yet each spike of satire is fitted with a safety-cap of feelgood reassurance.

A little girl called Olive (Abigail Breslin) has a shot at winning the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California, and for various reasons of economy and propriety, her whole crazy family has to accompany her there, travelling hundreds of miles together cross-country in a clapped-out old VW van. Dad is Greg Kinnear, a motivational speaker and would-be bestselling how-to-fix-your-life author who is secretly terrified of failure. Grandpa is Alan Arkin, a grizzled and aggressive user of hard drugs, thrown out of his retirement home for bad behaviour and now living with his unwilling extended family. Olive's teenage brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), refuses to speak and does nothing but read Nietzsche. And Olive's Uncle Frank, played by Steve Carell, is a deeply depressed gay Proust scholar who is recovering from a suicide attempt after being jilted by a grad student now living with a rival Proust expert boasting a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant and a sports car with a licence plate reading "LOST TIME". The one normal person keeping the show on the road is mom: Toni Collette.

Little Miss Sunshine is a genial and breezy film, with a neatly engineered dramatic twist - yet the satiric intent is weirdly uncertain. The movie is tricked out with embarrassments and euro-literary references and the very fact that they're headed for one of these creepy kiddie-beauty pageants is intended to function as a continuous, background guarantee of edginess and indie daring. But Little Miss Sunshine tips a trembling toe in the murky pool of implied paedophilia and anxiously withdraws it: preferring instead to convict beauty pageants on the more lenient and confused charge of being absurd, crass and, in fact, square. Dayton and Faris suggest that the Little Miss Sunshine contest, with its yankee-doodle-dandy showbizzery, is just plain stupid and that Olive's family may just be too exuberantly alternative for the lot of them.

It's a strange compromise. The ambiguous approach recalls another children's-striving contest currently fashionable in US cinema: the spelling bee, which in the documentary Spellbound and in the fictional features Bee Season and Akeelah and the Bee offers opportunities for family-conflict drama. But the question of whether this hothouse event is unnatural or even abusive is raised only in order to be dispelled, or effectively declared irrelevant to the larger issue of family emotions.

Olive's family all have issues: or the menfolk do, anyway - the mom is a paradigm of harassed common sense and little Olive herself, if we put aside her enthusiasm for the unwholesome beauty-parade, is sweet-natured and entirely ingenuous. But Dwayne and Dad and Grandpa are royally screwed up, and this especially goes for poor Uncle Frank - a nice, restrained performance from Steve Carell, who has to undergo a Calvary of humiliation when he is recognised by his former lover looking dishevelled at a gas station, just as he is buying porn. Surely Marcel never went through anything like this. Carell actually has the best scene in the film when he insists on explaining to little Olive at the family dinner-table - to the horror of her fastidious father - that he attempted suicide not precisely for the nobly romantic cause of unrequited love, or even because his loathed rival had snared this boy's affections; the trigger was this man gaining his "Genius" grant and effectively ruining Frank's jealously guarded academic status and pre-eminence.

All of their issues are amenable to some very convenient solutions, however, and there are some plot unrealities, to say the least, relating to legal procedures and much else: unrealities which, no matter how strenuously overlooked, make this a faintly unsatisfying watch. Family is everything is the implied moral of most Hollywood pictures. It's certainly the moral here, and there's nothing so very wrong with that, other than this essentially conservative picture had dressed itself up as something a lot more daring.

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merica's pre-teen beauty pageants: are they grotesque and inappropriate? Or inspirational, aspirational, and generally good, clean fun? After watching this movie, I'm still not sure how directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and screenwriter Michael Arndt would reply.

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https://edensimpsonsfilmstudiesblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/short-film-analysis-about-a-girl/

Short film lasting 9 minutes long which follows a teenage girl as she tells the story of her life and hopes for the future, whilst slowly dropping hints to the intense trauma which she has endured, and the difficulties of being a teenage girl. As she talks more, we learn more about her and why we are watching her walk down the canal, as she talks about her relationship with her mother, and how her mother threw an unwanted puppy in the canal, until the last shot where the girl is shown to throw a plastic bag in the river, which then, with the use of the perfect submerged shot, is revealed to be a baby, which is assumed to be hers

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/20/basic-instinct-sharon-stone-michael-douglas-hollywood-film-30-years

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hirty years ago, Basic Instinct was all anyone could talk about. Before our current age of Insta-controversies and aggregated showbiz news, it was widely known that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold his screenplay for a record $3m and that demonstrators in San Francisco, including Eszterhas himself, had protested against the film's association of lesbianism with violent psychosis. It was known that director Paul Verhoeven had battled the MPAA from an NC-17 rating to the hardest of R ratings in the states, and it took no time for buzz to circulate about the famed interrogation scene, where Catherine Trammell, the author and might-be murderess played by Sharon Stone, uncrosses her legs before a roomful of sweat-drenched men. (The odious trickery behind that shot, however, was still unknown.)

It would not be accurate to think about an artist of Verhoeven's stature as a troll, exactly, but he's a button-pusher of the first order. While his films, including last year's nunsploitation howler Benedetta, have an underlying seriousness to their provocations, he also enjoys poking the hornet's nest, seizing every opportunity to razz the scolds. Basic Instinct is a lively, sexy and fitfully repugnant vulgarization of film noir, targeting American audiences with such surgical precision that its title refers as much to them as the pleasure-seeking lunatics on screen. Even though he was from Holland, Verhoeven understood better than anyone in Hollywood the puritanical response of sex and violence, how it could attract and repulse simultaneously. Like a chemist splashing around with acids and bases, he knew how to produce heat.

Still, Basic Instinct was a less sui generis phenomenon than a studio finding the right person for the job. The $3m spent on Eszterhas's embarrassing but crudely effective screenplay was a small gamble on the hundreds of millions Fatal Attraction had made a few years earlier, also starring Michael Douglas as the aggrieved victim of his own desire. Verhoeven just did the formula one better: he had already given a knife to a Hitchcockian blonde in his great Dutch thriller The Fourth Man, and Basic Instinct allowed him to do it again in San Francisco, the home of Hitchcock's Vertigo. And he had a mandate to shock.

It takes no time for him to follow through. To the swells of Jerry Goldsmith's score - a brilliant Harlequin-ization of something Hitchcock's composer, Bernard Herrmann, might have done - Verhoeven starts with a suggestive dance of images around a blurry reflective surface before finally sharpening focus on a ceiling mirror above two wriggling bodies below. The woman on top, her blond hair obscuring her face, reaches first for a white silk scarf to tie her man's wrists to the bedposts. Then she reaches for an ice pick and repeatedly, savagely stabs him in the face and chest. (How savage? Rob Bottin, the legendary effects and makeup artist of The Thing and Verhoeven's Total Recall, went all out again here.) The victim is a retired rock star who never retired from sex and drugs. "He got off before he got off," cracks an investigator on the scene, spouting one of Eszterhas's million-dollar one-liners.

As Nick Curran, the ultimate cop-on-the-edge type, Douglas returned to the city that helped make his career with the TV policer The Streets of San Francisco, but his detective here follows his impulses as much as he does evidence - and more often than not, confuses the two. That makes him an ideal mark for Catherine, who presents such an open-and-shut case as the perpetrator that the obviousness of her guilt becomes her best defense. Not only is she the victim's longtime sex partner, spotted leaving a club with him the night of the murder, but she wrote a novel about killing a rock star. Nick comes around to her line of thinking, in no small part because he's drawn into pansexual orbit, despite her stated intent to write a new book abouta cop who's slain after falling for the wrong woman.

Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Eszterhas's script adds a couple of steamy alternatives to Catherine, like her jealous lesbian lover Roxy (Leilani Sarelle) and Nick's ex-lover Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), a police psychologist shielding him from an internal affairs investigation. There's also endless business about Catherine's past, in which her billionaire parents and Berkeley psychology professor died under mysterious circumstances. In one of the film's more quietly ridiculous scenes, Nick finds Catherine at home crying over the many, many, many people in her life who seem to die prematurely. She weeps about 10 feet away from an ice pick. She likes "rough edges" in her drinks.

One of Verhoeven's strongest qualities as a film-maker is that he's sophisticated without ever needing to be respectable, which allows for a film as unabashedly tawdry and "wrong" as Basic Instinct to plumb depths that mere exploitation never can. Verhoeven knows enough about cinema to realize that he can't turn the clock back on noir, so his solution is to make the implicit explicit and allow the sexual and intellectual confidence of his femme fatale to devour the entire film. Though Stone was far down the list of actors offered the role - most flatly rejected it, given the requirements of the job - she makes any other choice seem unthinkable in retrospect. Vertigo is about a woman (and then, a second woman) who is held captive by a man's obsession; Basic Instinct has the man held captive, and Catherine is the one pulling the strings, often accompanied by Stone's half-sinister/half-seductive grin.

At the same time, it's not revisionist thinking to recoil at certain moments in Basic Instinct, like Nick pushing past consensual boundaries with Beth or suggesting to Roxy that they talk "man to man". And it's just simple good taste to laugh at Eszterhas's over-cranked writing, which Verhoeven does not tamp down here any more than he would later with Showgirls. But the fact is that nothing like Basic Instinct could come out of risk-averse Hollywood today, at least not on the scale that might propel it to the center of American culture. The thirst is still there, with precious little to slake it.

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Basic Instinct at 30: a lurid throwback to when Hollywood still took risks

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hirty years ago, Basic Instinct was all anyone could talk about. Before our current age of Insta-controversies and aggregated showbiz news, it was widely known that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold his screenplay for a record $3m and that demonstrators in San Francisco, including Eszterhas himself, had protested against the film's association of lesbianism with violent psychosis.

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The Banshees of Inisherin 2022 Martin McDonagh

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/23/the-banshees-of-inisherin-review-martin-mcdonagh-colin-farrell-brendan-gleeson

Spent a lot of this film wondering when something was going to happen and when something would be revealed, but in what felt like slow almost nothingness came great subtly in the meaning, and meant that I then thought about the film for the weeks after watching it. Successful in its quietness, and loud in its meaning and ability to touch the viewer

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The Banshees of Inisherin review – flawless tragicomedy of male friendship gone sour

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Three Billboards and In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh reunites Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in this deliciously melancholy tale set in remotest 1920s Ireland

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Portrait of a Lady on Fire 2019 Celine Sciamma 

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/01/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-review-celine-sciamma

Again, whilst showing only minimal happenings on the screen, manages to hold the viewers attention so strongly but so delicately in how it does so.

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hat a thrillingly versatile film-maker Céline Sciamma has proved to be. Having made an arthouse splash with the Euro-hits Water Lilies and , she wrote and directed ( Bande de filles), a breathtaking portrait of modern "banlieue life" that completed her "accidental trilogy of youth". Her impressive screenplay credits include Claude Barras's My Life as a Courgette, a tenderly empathetic, French-Swiss stop-motion masterpiece that earned an Oscar nomination for its vividly resilient depiction of children in care. In each of these very different projects, Sciamma has struck an accessible chord by focusing tightly on specifics, finding the key to universal appeal in the unique, tiny details of each story and character.

For her fourth feature as writer-director, Sciamma ventures to a new world of the late 18th century. We first meet Marianne (Noémie Merlant, star of Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar's Le ciel attendra) teaching life study in Paris to art students, one of whom stumbles upon her titular painting. An arresting night-time image of a woman whose dress is hemmed with flames, this painting provides a portal to the past. Through it, we are transported back to Marianne's stormy, sea-bound arrival at a remote Brittany residence where she is to paint former convent girl Héloïse ( Water Lilies alumnus Adèle Haenel). Héloïse's countess mother (played with imperious fragility by Valeria Golino) intends to send the painting to a Milanese nobleman; if he approves, her daughter will be wed and they will both be transported to a new life. But Héloïse has no desire to be married, and has already defeated one painter who left without ever seeing her face. So Marianne, who has been brought here on the pretext of being a chaperone and companion, must study and paint her subject in secret, looking without appearing to look...

That this deception should soon be revealed is no surprise - the electric tension between the pair prevents either of them from keeping secrets for long. Yet when confronted with Marianne's first attempt to capture her likeness, Héloïse is appalled. "Is that how you see me?" she demands, stunned less by Marianne's deceit than by the lack of life - of "presence" - in her picture. "The fact it isn't close to me, that I can understand," she says bitterly. "But I find it sad it isn't close to you."

What follows is an intellectually erotic study of power and passion in which observed becomes observer, authored becomes author, returning time and again to a central question: "If you look at me, who do I look at?" It's a question that reverberates throughout Sciamma's playfully literate film, which rightly won the Cannes prize for best screenplay last year. We hear it echoed in a historically accurate discussion of the way the art world keeps women in their place by proscribing the subjects of their gaze, their inquiry.

More significantly, it informs an ongoing debate about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that runs like a silver thread through the drama. "He doesn't make the lover's choice, but the poet's," Marianne says of Orpheus and his fateful decision to look back as he ascends from the underworld. But perhaps that decision was not his to make? Could Eurydice be the author of her own fate, the commander of his gaze?

Painterly... Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Photograph: Curzon Artificial Eye

Digitally filmed in tactile, painterly hues by Claire Mathon, who did such shimmering work on Mati Diop's , Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the French title uses the less Jamesian "jeune fille") seamlessly intertwines themes of love and politics, representation and reality. At times it plays like a breathless romance, trembling with passionate anticipation. Elsewhere, it seems closer to a sociopolitical treatise, what Sciamma has called "a manifesto about the female gaze". Ghostly images of Héloïse in her wedding dress lend a quasi-gothic edge, and there's something of the Brontës in the cliffside walks she embraces with abandon. Yet Sciamma is careful to keep such heightened emotions rooted in the firm soil of social realism. A subplot about young maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) dealing with an unwanted pregnancy finds Sciamma at her most quietly radical, not only confronting but also depicting a taboo subject and its representation, refusing to look away, finding strength in sorority.

Musically, Sciamma keeps things sparse and diegetic, mirroring Héloïse's cloistered experience (she longs to hear an orchestra), emphasising her silenced sense of imprisonment. All the more significant, then, that a signature scene bursts into vibrant song - a chorus of live vocals and handclaps that momentarily lifts the film into an ecstatically uncanny reverie, as mesmerisingly magical as anything I can recall seeing on screen.

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Portrait of a Lady on Fire review - mesmerised by the female gaze

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hat a thrillingly versatile film-maker Céline Sciamma has proved to be. Having made an arthouse splash with the Euro-hits Water Lilies and , she wrote and directed ( Bande de filles), a breathtaking portrait of modern "banlieue life" that completed her "accidental trilogy of youth".

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/nov/20/aftersun-review-charlotte-wells-luminous-father-daughter-drama-paul-mescal

Shot on film, Aftersun was a gorgeous film about a father and his daughter on holiday, from the unreliable view of the daughter, now grown and trying to place where her father was struggling. The scenes where adult Sophie is in a club and catches glimpses at her father, just arms reach away are beautiful and work really well. For the first part of the film, you are unsure as to what these sequences are, but by the end you are presented all the pieces to grasp at what the film is trying to say. The club scenes were a brilliant way of demonstrating a drowning-like struggle with mental illness without being too crude and obvious with it.

We watch as Sophie tries to fill in the gaps between her miniDV footage as if we have crawled inside Sophies brain and, like her, are looking for answers in where her father was struggling; trying to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't, and the parts of him that he hid from her because she was only a child.

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arlier this month, the debut feature from Scottish-born, New York-based writer-director Charlotte Wells picked up a whopping 16 nominations for the British Independent Film awards, an impressive haul second only to 's record-breaking performance in 2020. It's easy to see why Aftersun has generated such excitement since premiering at Cannes in May. A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don't be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she's doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

We meet young, separated father Calum ( Normal People's Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (screen newcomer Frankie Corio), on holiday together in Turkey in the late 1990s. Sophie is smart for her age (she and Calum are sometimes mistaken for siblings) but she's still also very much a child, torn between hanging out with the younger kids at the resort or with the more boisterous teenagers who lounge around the pool table. As for Calum, his outward calm seems to cover demons of denial; a trancey energy that threatens to break through the placid surface of his current life, dragging him back into a more chaotic - or euphoric - existence (director and Aftersun co-producer Barry Jenkins describes Calum as "wading through wells of quiet anguish").

Scrappy DV-cam footage offers apparently concrete evidence of the interactions between Sophie and Calum, with both roles being performed with quite breathtaking naturalism. Yet Aftersun is constructed as a very personal recollection, filtered through a haze of memory and imagination by the now-adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on things she didn't really understand at the time. That tension between fact and fiction - between recorded and remembered events - draws us deep into the drama, causing us to examine every frame as if searching for clues to a hidden truth that remains tantalisingly elusive. It often seems as if the real story is playing out beyond the edges of the frame, dancing in the shadows beyond the confines of the screen. Plaudits to editor Blair McClendon, who juxtaposes scenes and images in almost hyperreal, dreamlike fashion, conjuring a magical space in which time seems to bend emotionally.

Appropriately for a work that is clearly profoundly personal, Wells says the roots of Aftersun lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. Later, she came across a photo in which she was sitting by a pool in Spain, with "a very beautiful woman right behind me... and it made me wonder who the real subject of the picture was". That sense of mystery runs throughout this mesmerising feature, which, despite being set largely in the past, nonetheless feels peculiarly present.

Wells showcases a Proustian talent for transporting the audience back into a world they didn't actually experience

Some of the groundwork for Aftersun was laid in Wells's 2015 short film Tuesday(she has called this "a sequel of sorts, in a different place and time"). There's more than a hint of the tactility of Lynne Ramsay's early works, with short films such as Gasman (1997) and features such as Ratcatcher(1999) clearly serving as inspirations. Just as Ramsay has an almost uncanny ability to capture the texture of memories on screen, so Wells showcases a Proustian talent for transporting the audience back into a world they didn't actually experience, while making them feel like they did. There are also clear traces of the films of Margaret Tait in Wells's craft, specifically Blue Black Permanent (1992), which seems to have served as a tonal reference (a volume of Tait's writings is prominently displayed on screen).

Gregory Oke's cinematography captures the colour of memory, with bright exteriors and glowing surfaces carefully graded by Kath Raisch to evoke vivid snapshots of fleeting moments. Composer Oliver Coates weaves his way in and out of the film's emotional labyrinth, while deftly chosen needle drops (including a mashed-up vocal version of the Queen-David Bowie hit Under Pressure) put us right there in the moment.

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Aftersun review - luminous father-daughter drama starring Paul Mescal

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arlier this month, the debut feature from Scottish-born, New York-based writer-director Charlotte Wells picked up a whopping 16 nominations for the British Independent Film awards, an impressive haul second only to 's record-breaking performance in 2020. It's easy to see why Aftersun has generated such excitement since premiering at Cannes in May.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/nov/20/the-menu-review-mark-mylod-ralph-fiennes-anya-taylor-joy-nicholas-hoult

Absurdity in the face of extreme privilege. (7/10)

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Succession director Mark Mylod has an acute eye for the absurdity of extreme privilege. So the preposterous world of haute cuisine is almost too easy a target: not so much about eating as worshipping at the altar of the chef's ego. The chef in this case is Ralph Fiennes, sporting joylessly immaculate whites and an expression of patrician displeasure. The guests at his culinary temple, run with a cult-like devotion by the ferocious front of house manager Elsa (Hong Chau), are a tasteless bunch: a trio of braying investment bankers, a needy movie star, a miserable wealthy couple trying to buy some meaning into their lives. And then there's Margot ( Anya Taylor-Joy), the last-minute date of foodie fanboy Tyler ( Nicholas Hoult). Margot is more interested in sneaking a cigarette than fawning over chef's sous vide technique. She is the one errant ingredient in the evening's menu.

Subtle it's not, but it's maliciously entertaining. It turns out that revenge on the ultra-wealthy is a dish best seared over a naked flame.

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The Menu review - revenge is served hot in delicious haute cuisine satire

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Succession director Mark Mylod has an acute eye for the absurdity of extreme privilege. So the preposterous world of haute cuisine is almost too easy a target: not so much about eating as worshipping at the altar of the chef's ego. The chef in this case is Ralph Fiennes, sporting joylessly immaculate whites and an expression of patrician displeasure.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/18/the-square-review-ruben-ostlund-cannes-palme-dor

Strikes conversation about how prestigious art galleries and the art world can sometimes become so prestigious that they loose touch with the world today, and raises the question of artistic freedom and license. When is a work too controversial to be shown? Too ambitious? Too upsetting and disturbing for the viewer and too caught up in its own small circle. (Or square lol)

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The Square review - an archly entertaining swipe at the art world

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he publicity for Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winner The Square features Terry Notary as performance artist Oleg, stripped to the waist, mounting a table at an upmarket dinner and glowering with animalistic rage. It's an arresting tableau - baffling and intriguing, promising anarchic action and titilatory spectacle.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/04/cmon-cmon-review-mike-mills-joaquin-phoenix-woody-norman-gaby-hoffmann

Shot on black and white film, C'mon C'mon focused on the relations adults can have with children and young people, whilst also looking at society and how we deal with children on a macro scale. It has a lot of love for people, mothers and parenthood, and takes children and their outlook on our world today so seriously; how complex the child is, how they are still figuring out who they are and where they stand today in the modern world, how they don't quite understand quite what they are feeling, and how they are in need of a hand to hold

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/03/why-tar-should-win-the-best-picture-oscar

I think even though this film was long and felt quite slow in places, it enabled itself to be slow by being able to uphold the attention of its viewer by both visual and conceptual intrigue. I think its a very interesting topic to cover, and to look at how the wider public view overly successful and powerful women.

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https://talkfilmsociety.com/columns/beyond-the-final-girl-suspiria-and-the-power-of-witches

I found the visual aesthetics of this film very intriguing, as well as the story line and the focus on the "mother". It really captured my attention in confusing but intriguing ways and made me really feel.

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Article on the representation of trauma in contemporary arts.