Description
Playpoems is a video installation presenting a compilation of eleven video vignettes projected intermittently on four foam core sheets installed on the gallery wall at a forty-five degree angle. Ambient sounds from the videotaping can be heard.
The video vignettes include single channel videos Playpoem Verse III, Playpoem Verse IV, Playpoem Verse V and The Waves in Eflat & F (A conversation with my Mother) (Play Poem I). Some of the other videos show documentation of moving the net from the work Nœuds d’écoute / Listening Knots along the dike into the Bay of Fundy, and the preparation of the paper string for the work The Waves: Following the curves of the sentence.
Statement
Playpoems is part of a series of videos and performances inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Published in 1931, she called it her “play-poem”. In these works, I imagine myself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with bodies of text, hands, the tide, the repetitiveness of waves, the ocean and the land. This thought guided the making of these works during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton and Mount Allison University, Sackville in New Brunswick. Students, friends, the ocean and the land were active participants.