Chapter 11

In March 2019, I was captivated by those eyes. At the rate they were moving, it almost seemed like a photograph. Hypnotic: like my eyes had glued against a thin layer of common space we were sharing. Saoirse Wall’s body was going to move slowly many times, but their eyes would never break their bond with mine. When I eventually broke eye contact with Gesture 2 (2014), I felt like those eyes were placing me in the position of someone who had been spoken to. Later I would find out another side of this confrontational approach with Sticky Encounter (2016) when I travelled through Saoirse Wall’s interior body via endoscopy camera. With you in the garden (2020) the use of intimate point-of-view camera angle is pushed further. Wall’s legs and arms sticking out of my view while a description of the visuals narrates.

“There are my legs and arms! No, no”, I thought intuitively. “Why is that? Is it about the first ‘you’ pronounced in the narration? Me? Yes: you in the garden. Is it because of the camera angle? Am I implicated in the dance, in this amusing body flow, because of it? Am I being forced into a specific set of positions? Am I being controlled? Isn’t it like being in a sort of first person oniric video game?” The body which my mind wanted to merge with was the camera.

It is as Wall told me, “the body becomes camera and this informs its choreography, and this movement is also the movement of the camera, or the cinematography.”

Saoirse Wall, you in the garden, 2020, Single channel HD video and sound, 2:27 min