C.O.W Spells Cow
Scale features in my ‘diorama’, juxtaposed to a painting called The Sausage Wars. This work is inspired by performance artist Stuart Sherman. His ‘spectacles’ in the 1980s, performed mostly on TV trays, are like scaled down absurd dramas. Attention is given to the relations between the ‘representations’ and the ‘objects’ and the sequence of interactions. The ‘landscape’ is performed on a table and a song lyric about ‘making meat pies’ is sung through the guises of a farmer in conversation with a consumer agent about the food industry.
Soft Border Control
A car follows another car to the border, but does not cross it. Dashcam footage directs our gaze, as though it belonged to the undercover world of surreptitious observation. We presume that state surveillance along this border may exist to secretly observe and deal with certain undesirable activities. We follow an unknowing and unknown person driving a car across the border with a broken taillight.
A blissed-out techno-bunny sings about her integration with such technology.
The Hyphen
The Hyphen, superimposes images of the border (at Blacklion Bridge) appropriated from London-centric TV news on to a romantic or patriotic speech about ‘the hyphen’ as a metaphorical bridge between nations. Read by John Wayne, it is a short and funny reflection on national perceptions and desires that inflect what borderlands are. John Wayne’s outdated reflections of nationhood provide audio to more recent footage of my community as it is portrayed on TV news. This juxtaposition is a kind of diagrammatic thinking or strange mapping of ways in which borders are represented.