ELASTIC COLLISION
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web…we must pick out what is good for us where we can find it. Picasso
Barbara Dougan and Darren Ellis have collaborated on Unentitled since early 2014 exploring concepts and visualisations of constraint, resistance and adaptation. Previously, Barbara had made several films exploring confinement in which she describes herself as “subject, maker and medium and it has been fundamental to the work that I am present.” The initial steps of their collaboration involved visiting a Bill Viola exhibition together and then, rather more like a play-date than research, both of them squeezed into the small glass box that is the m² Gallery in Peckham, the name of which describes the physical limit of the space. Barbara was creating another iteration of Unentitled at the gallery later that summer, laying emphasis on the ever- widening gap between those with “an innate sense of entitlement and those who appear to have no rights.”
But the collaboration with Darren was to explore their common interest in the way restriction determines behaviour and how the trained body communicates through movement. This enabled and required Barbara to stand one layer further back, becoming the director. The project currently comprises one major performance and film installation plus three films shown in other formats. Tea Break I and II , with more than a tip of the beret to Jacques Tati, play out dainty, funny, clumsy, self-consciously measured movements of the participants as they make their way through a web of stretched elastic lines just to get some daily tasks done then, with any luck, have a cup of tea. Who imposed the constraints is left an open question. They have been shown in iPad frames as a diptych of images with an air of small paintings brought to life; confined to a domestic scale in presentation and content. Yet when Tea Break is projected life-size the point is more strongly made that the actions are in parallel but never coincide at the same point twice. Living Room is the domestic aftermath of the main installation in which it is all brought home to us.
The third layer of collaboration is with dancer Hannah Kidd. She appears in the main film negotiating a web or rigging of tensed black elastic lines, fixed to the floor and stretched out at all angles, zigzagging over an area of only about 11 metres square. This sculptural maze has a strong visual presence through which the dancer confidently proceeds, feints, lunges, attacks, gets stuck, backtracks: tension builds. The elastic is in a state of tension, stretched tight; the dancer tenses mentally and physically as she progresses; there is suspense and anxiety for the audience and so a drama is created.
At The Place in December 2014 the film was projected on a screen behind a re-installation in situ of the elastic framework. Layers are accumulated before our eyes so that we see the dancer filmed as if the struggle takes place in a box, then her shadow, the shadow of the elastic lines and finally the dancer appears in front of us, casts her shadow once more and we watch and hear her tackle the undergrowth. The recorded sound track is minimal with the thrum of elastic twanging and the occasional note of bird song. I was taken back to childhood tales and thought first of Briar Rose and Sleeping Beauty, the eternal story of the girl entrapped by spells. Perhaps the dancer had reversed the tale – escaping through thorny branches without waiting for that releasing kiss. Or maybe she was on a mission of rescue herself. Her movements show determination, she pulls herself through sticky patches, finding speed as she retreats to return more vigorously and put her back into it. The formality of the pattern-making and the taut frame of lines also recalled for me French skipping where two people hold a rectangle of elastic or string round their ankles (then knees, then waist) and a third person picks and lifts the lines with her feet, drawing prescribed patterns in space. But these allusions don’t mean that there is anything but unnerving, adult concerns at play here in Unentitled.
Living Room is the denouement in which the metaphors become darker. Filmed in a house, the viewer/camera stays in the kitchen watching the dancer in a living room beyond which a garden is glimpsed. Maybe that briar thicket is still outside. The dancer reprises all the movements that got her through and out beyond the tangle but, like the dancer in Red Shoes, seems compelled to repeat her actions endlessly. Even though free of visible constraints she appears restrained by internal bonds, her room to live compromised and the actions repeated on a loop.
Elastic collision is the point at which the kinetic energy of two bodies after an encounter is equal to that energy before. There is a real sense of wit and strength in all parts of Unentitled so perhaps our heroine is simply rehearsing for anotherencounter with the constraints and bindings that are imposed upon her but “perfect elasticity is an approximation of the real world and few materials remain purely elastic even after very small deformations.” (Wikipedia)
Gill Hedley, January 2015