REBECCA WATERSTONE here / there
Split-screen projection, soundpiece, scent (Blue Mountains Eucalyptus) 2017 20min 30sec
Soundpieces: Rebecca Waterstone, Abi Fry, CC
A visual dialogue between two films, made in the Blue Mountains, Australia, and the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Merging and blurring realities, they depict the liminal experience of living between one place physically, and another in mind and heart. The motif of mountains binds the films’ narratives together. The pull, and yearning for one place - and the people within it - when in the other, is profound. The spoken word is a reading of a (fictional) British Shipping Forecast. Listened to by folk in the UK , it acts as a reassuring anchor, or lullaby. Tuning in late at night to the mellifluous tones of the broadcaster, it conjures romantic images of life at sea around the wild coastlines of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, while listeners rest safe and dry in their beds, or rugged up by a warm fireplace. This is a safe way to experience two opposing realities at once. Often describing elemental, tempestuous, potentially life-threatening weather outside, it is also a fitting metaphor for the liminal experience of being in a protected, nourishing place physically, while searching for a safe way to ride out the internal storms of aching for loved ones, navigating uncertainty, and coping with the kind of enforced distance and isolation that tears at the soul.
Over the course of 15 years, I moved in and out of these states of overlapping realities - living in two places at once. In Australia, I was sometimes in my body, and other times I was there only in my head and heart. Simultaneously, or alternately, I was physically or mentally located in Scotland. This duality was both intensely rich and nourishing, while also creating a heightened sense of uncertainty and limbo.
These films establish a third, merged reality that can be observed from a safe distance. The work was made to bring this experience outside of myself, transforming it into external matter, giving respite to my mind, and creating the conditions for others to experience this reality. Making the internal states into separate external entities was an attempt to understand the tangled complexities and navigate my existence between two hemispheres, two continents, two states of being, two full lives of families, friends and places. The mingling of images and sound, alternately fusing and pulling in opposite directions, is the embodiment of the tensions experienced while living simultaneously in multiple worlds.
Rebecca Waterstone has worked in Australia and internationally as an artist, art educator and curator for 30 years. Her work is comprised of multi-disciplinary creative practice (as research), site-specific curation, creative project management, art education, exhibition development, and public programming. She devises and delivers situational, community-engaged contemporary art projects that blend and expand definitions of creative disciplines, challenging traditional norms of public exhibition by fostering new dialogues between artists, community groups, and historic architectural spaces. In her own practice, she makes work focusing on materialities, and experiential qualities of colour, time and place.
