‘An island is not the opposite of the mainland; it’s as connected as all parts of the earth are. It’s just that we can’t see it under the waters, nor can we see that the waters are what define all life.’ (from Island Bodies, my short essay on the works that inspired the film. See https://www.pennyflorence.com/new-page-1)
This is a short film about the art of Kate Walters. The film consciously seeks to explore what Jane Rendell has called ‘the spatial qualities of the critic’s engagement with art’, especially at the intersection of word and image. The artist at the heart of film, Kate Walters, is a trained and experienced shaman. As such, her connection with site as location and as artwork-as-process is vital in both senses: it is alive; and it is indispensable. Fields of Awareness references this, both in its rhythms and in its connection with the Scottish islands. I composed the voiceover by taking the words and phrases from the artist’s Notebooks, so it is both by the artist and by myself as filmmaker, echoing, perhaps Luce Irigaray’s approach to Nietzsche in Marine Lover. Furthermore, in its pace and editing, it weaves word into image and both into the transformative art that is film, invoking the links between inner and outer worlds.
I am Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. An interdisciplinarian working between digital language art, poetry, film, feminism, my international publications focus on the multivalent relations between forms of art and poetry. I have supervised over 25 practice based PhDs on art and writing and am a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists. I have also been privileged to join Jane Rendell in teaching students of the Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing module, bringing together practice-based PhD students from The Slade and the Bartlett. I hope that my latest book Thinking the Sculpture Garden (Routledge 2020) will be thought as site-writing.
I do not differentiate clearly between practice and thought. A differential exists, but the exact moment of transition is as unknowable as the moment of coalescence into form: awareness here is retrospective. Boundaries have their uses, but they are ultimately restrictive, especially when elevated to principles. So writing may evolve into painting, film, and so forth. These factors define for me Jane Rendell’s understanding of “site-specificity” within site-writing, which isn’t a matter of inter/cross-disciplinarity, but a rather generously expansive mode of exploration that enables both freedom and structure, because it is its own site, yet it is interconnected.
Julia Kristeva The Revolution in Poetic Language (Columbia UP 1984).
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898).
Independent feminist activism.
