Working with experimental video art, I am exploring the use of spliced footage, projected on the very surfaces the video is interrogating. With an interest in the relationship between destruction and intimacy, “She gonna bring that attitude home” sees the use of personal footage from floods and fire, intertwined with tight shots of a domestic environment to remind us that the elements have the power to both destroy and revive. 

This project is derived from my experiences in living through a natural disaster and what comes after. It began as a public art sculpture reading Waiting, made from flooded shipping pallets that went through the 2022 Lismore floods. Presented to regional disaster effected communities around Australia it connected towns that were living through the same story and then the time came for the elements to take it back. In a ceremonial fire, the sculpture was destroyed. The wooden pallets that been through flood waters, scrubbed cleaned by fresh water, built into something new, were now ashes and only living on in a digital realm. 

As a way to present this journey, I dove into the world of experimental video art and my research has led me to 1970s video artists. In Robin Laurie and Margot Wash’s video “We Aim to Please: Violence” from 1976, they highlight gendered violence through close up imagery of the artists as subjects. This inspired me to incorporate footage of my own hands, wringing and washing with soap and water. The zoomed in washing becomes abstracted from its original form, showing an intimate act. Looking to the works of Peter Weibel and Marcel Broodthaers who respectively used projections and video art to interrogate the medium itself, I use these theories to present this work not just as digital videos but as an installation as a whole, projecting the video of pallets burning onto the pallets as an object. 

Surviving  flooding has left me with a complex relationship to water, it caused so much destruction but was also the revival. Washing flood mud becomes part of everyday life in a post-natural disaster world. Washing of belongings and then washing of yourself. I wanted to incorporate this to show this intimate action. The footage of the fire from the sculpture burning began as representational and as the project evolved has become more abstracted. By turning the fire on its side it has become iteration of any possible fire. Using light to project the videos on new found pallets ensures the sculpture stays digital. It is only a projection of what is once was, now light, reflecting on the water spill on the ground and then in a flash it is gone and all that is left is a pallet.

This work looks to the contrasting themes of this destruction but also to what can be with its revival. By intertwining my own experiences within this experimental video art installation I invite the audience to immerse themselves and consider their own revival.