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Victoria, Australia
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TCB acknowledges the people of the Kulin Nations as the traditional custodians of the land, recognising their connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and future.
©2024 TCB Art Inc.
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MARGUERITE CARSON
a view from nowhere or the loop closes itself
2024
❦
Skye Malu Baker, A R T H ~ air and light, dust and earth ~
Gallery One, 17 Aug 2024—15 Sept 2024
Begin
Dappled light fills the screen in husky warm tones, the only warmth of the film as though someone held hand over lens in bright sunlight.
The abstract shapes move and flicker jumpily, the image shakes with infestation of tiny particles, scratches and burns.
The sketch of a scene briefly touches the screen before disappearing again.
Now the image settles,
the film opens.
Dappled light fills the screen in husky warm tones, the only warmth of the film as though someone held hand over lens in bright sunlight.
The abstract shapes move and flicker jumpily, the image shakes with infestation of tiny particles, scratches and burns.
The sketch of a scene briefly touches the screen before disappearing again.
Now the image settles,
the film opens.
There is a MAN. On the peak of an ISLAND by a bristle of antenna.
He walks down the hill, it is dusk.
_
A man appears under a large pylon. The ground slopes away to either side, steep in places. There is a faint hum in the air. He may have emerged from the path hidden in the trees that follows the ridge, or clambered up the loose earth, using the small trunks that grow thickly across the slope. Neither is probable. More likely he turned up, looked around him then up at the sun making its way through its descent, and set off. He walks down through a clear saddle with a view of the sea on both sides before disappearing into the scrub, out-of-sight.
The island looms large, a great hunk of sludge on the horizon.
It seems to sit in communion with the dark line between sea and sky, draped with weather that falls in layers. The island could be a stencil in its flatness.
The camera lingers still, watching. The weather moves around it, painting new shades of grey onto the various surfaces, which begin to swim into one another. The shape of the island seems burned into our retinas, the camera's retina, the sensitive skin at the back, coated in emulsion.
The camera begins to zoom. Still with the island bulk centred within the frame, it travels slowly towards us, or we toward it, by turns menacing and benign. The weather continues to change, almost imperceptibly, keeping alive as the flat cut-out surface fills the frame. Eventually only undisturbed grey can be seen as the edges move outside the bounds of the screen. It could be sky or sea or a blank sheet of paper that we are gazing upon. Empty and featureless.
A flurry of other islands, substituted for this one, take the frame. Each a different shape, each shot still and unmoving. Looming and drenched.
Like slides in a projector
Change and change and change, slow
A rhythm.
We see only the man's throat as he gazes slightly upward. The shot is from below his shoulder height but not below his waist. In the dusk he too is rendered greyish, washed out, another silhouette, this time with features.
His jaw against the backdrop, the lower part of his face angular, his skin becomes a landscape and the undulations of flesh become those of a new geography.
The antennae behind him, still bristling. Wheeling birds overhead, dark. Tracing new movement.
Change
Circling, flying in from the sea to find burrows used for generations, abandoned and returned to each year, dug out, fought over, occasionally collapsed. Something has happened, the birds circling and circling, their cries mingling and growing in a swelling cacophony. It is never clear why they could not land this time. The view is only of their undersides.
A shot filled only with sky. Wide, but still not wide enough to hold the entire arc of each bird as it traces its score. The claustrophobia of searching presses upon the frame. The air is thick with them. Thickening. The silence makes itself felt in its lack. Their cacophony of movement unaccompanied.
The pace seems quick but the shots are slow, lingering. Tinted in dusk, as though steeped in it.
Technicolour film is shot as separate images, dyed and recombined. First as two colours, red and green, then as three.
This film is dyed in green tones
Not red yellow blue but deeper tertiary
Charcoals and greens
Terre Verte is a colour mined from the earth,
used historically in underpainting white flesh tones
Dead flesh has no colour
used historically in underpainting white flesh tones
Dead flesh has no colour
Underlying every image is a grid, almost floral, decorative and regular
It belies a logic obscured
Cuts off the depth
Everything a cutting mat, a table, a surface
The smudge of island reappears
It seems painted
The water moves, not in great swells but in miniscule undulations that hold infinite complexity. Disorientingly swimming on the screen, sickeningly. Each a fragment of darker colour turned, as though through it another image might be found.
A dusky quality clings to the water; into which the grain of the image seeps, the two swimming together imperceptibly.
Fragments imbued with the greeny hues of shadowed, slime-covered rocks found by the water’s edge. Glauconite green, sick like hair slicked across cold grey.
The rhythm of the water set against the rhythm of film coruscating. The movement runs out, an abrupt stop with the film itself, its last frames tinged with the burn of spent leader.
We return to the horizon, as though tracing a gentle wave or sharp edge. The movement is still present, this time further out, broken by the influx of sky in the upper frame. Everything is steadier, drawing lines even as it disappears into something else. The island seems to float, untethered and bottomless.
The man stands on a shingle beach
His hands sift through stones
Handling them
Looking for something.
Rock surface fills the frame
Panning slowly downward until coming upon a pool, almost indistinguishable from the rock it reflects, those same patterns shimmering with slight movement. The edges just feebly shaking, disrupting the vertical intent.
The camera slows, and stops. The pool, the reflection, becomes the scene, so that we forget its inversion. A surface upon a surface, a surface copied. Transcribed.
The stones, this rock surface of cliff streaked downwards, are white-grey but still the green tinge persists, this time with blue hues too.
The man's hands, between his crouching knees. One elbow on his thigh, a support.
He holds an object, turning it, the craggy surface white-green and irregular.
Rock surface again fills the frame, this time held in a palm. Then gripped.
An interdispersal between shots, an entrance of one then the other.
First something bright. Glistening of the sun on water. The brightness burning in spots of overexposure ringed by faint orange hue, secondary still to the image of the hand holding stone.
The bright burns are laid with a new shot; a coastal field of boulders and grasses nestled in a low depression that leads to the sea. It takes a moment to register the exit of the hand.
Still in the open space we see a new angle: The boulders are larger, their edges square and surface white, the sea receded. Behind, crags loom in shoulders of land. Heavy and strange. Between them, a figure appears. There is a cleft that opens into this expanse, rising high and irregular on either side of him, enclosing his body.
The camera closes in ever-tighter. Briefly, so that it could have been only imagined, it flips upside down. The angular enclosure reversed and nauseating, his feet glued to the ceiling of land, held in the pillars of cliff with feet planted in the nothingness out-of-sight below.
Eventually
A bird lies dead against the grass
Still
unmoving
Still
Its feathers tinged with frost, this time in washed black-and-white, the bird is dark in colour and remains dark against the grass, each blade rigid in its own delicate tangle.
A skin of cold prickling
Caught in interminable present
The colourlessness remains, less stark.
A bird doused in slick-something-perhaps-only-water
A series of frames, birds splayed, dead reminiscent of the islands like slides
Smudged, so that they barely register by the end.
The antennae again, reaching up to the sky in fingers, shifting slightly in the wind, silently
The shot lingers
As if tired, as if dwelling
As if unsure where to go next.
Every action is a movement, every movement an action. Languishing with unfocused eyes
It pans (to the left)
To look out from this high point
The land falling away, stretching across the frame
Cut against the lighter sky
The shape is dramatic
The land drifts downward
Shrouded in dusky hues, a purple lilt over everything and in the shadows of green, grey heavy sky that drapes itself without stopping for the solidity of ground.
As it moves a movement joins: The man again walking, partially obscured by foliage. There is a diagonal path, sunk between thick undergrowth, running up the contour, folded in
His torso moves upward as we continue to move with him. The shot unchanged becomes one of his walking, until gaze and man stop together, a natural vantage point. He pauses and looks out. We leave his gaze to linger on his face.
The man has not once looked at the camera, always watching outward.
The shining sea hypnotic, this desert of water glows like burnished metal. The blues and golds removed in washed tones. The camera pans his gaze, turning on the spot, a dizzying spin all the way around, we are lost in the arc, an electrostatic crackle in the atmosphere. The sum of prayers aimed at rainclouds.[1]
The camera, which has been present all this time, lurking, is now positioned at waist-height following a path through trees. Enclosed on either side, hemmed in, the shot is claustrophobic, directed to the ground. The path stretches forward without giving much away. This is not an enlightening gaze, it is focused.
The footage shakes just slightly, only enough to give the impression of a view from the body, attached to it, seen from within. This is the transcription of an experience of movement, except it is reversed.
Cut
Three steps break the reverie so that the dampened tread can almost be heard
Cut the path is empty once more, the shot reuptakes its retreat.
Moving slowly backwards through time, new shapes reveal themselves to either side of the centred vacant space
The gaze still fixed disorientingly downwards.
We make a turn in slow reverse following the path, the unity of central framing interrupted. The camera moves differently, the body that holds our gaze has stepped over something. We are forewarned before it slinks into view.
A carcass, opened at the breast. Beak at a strange angle. Feathers and down surround the wound, dried and caked.
The camera continues to move backward, over and around other birds in various states of disintegration. Slowly the image becomes increasingly overexposed, washed-out white, bright blank space. As it fades it turns almost negative, trace dark lines illuminating one last dilapidated form.
Again we see him crouching against the water, water reflecting weather, water rough and matt. On the horizon, something brightens: A brief pillar of sun, ever-changing, threatening the edge of the image with the all-encompassing white. Brightness threatens removal.
He stands, so that only his legs are visible, on uneven stones.
A splash in the shallows, large and rippled. Water now fills the frame, his body gone. He has thrown the stone hard into the sea, an arc and action that we imagine, just out of sight. We linger, wondering.
A field of low boulders cascading toward the water. We recognise it, we are on the water now; The land an impression, rising away, behind. The boulders stretch wide, all we can see, white and dominant. A body moving among them - the man’s - crawling prostrate
Small like an insect across the tumbled shapes
A lament of sorts
Filling the frame, which becomes suddenly small, as if it cannot hold so much
Close now, only his skin against the light stone. Soft body form, of muscle and joint, dragging lithe and slow struggle, strange and uncomfortable
Dwelling
This body speaks in fragments, against the unitary whole
Swell crashes, froths gently in repetitive irregular movement
The body slowly moves
The bulky shingle meets the moving swell as arms and shoulder, head cross the boundary,
Trousered legs
Water leaving a tide line soaking through first contact then second completes the darkening
Rolling like washed-up-something in the shallows. He crawls further in, diagonally moving, left to right. He is a line of horizon in the tightened frame.
Now his hands submerged to the forearm, face in the water. We taste the salt filling his hair, a rough wave filled with debris of the beach surface deposits small shingle on him. His skin sparkles with the wet as it recedes
Birds wheel overhead
His feet stand on a concrete dyke, protruding from thick ferns,
a small trickle of water, flowing into sludgy thickness the walls base extends above, murky contrasting textures
Feet walk carefully along the flat top, only slightly wider than shoe, one foot balancing in front of the other, ankles wavering but steady.
Trouser above shoe, small glimpse of sock
The water again,
A leg extended down, stepping off, a descent just too great to be controlled, a foot careens through the water's surface to sink, followed by another, wading through water now, calf height and boggy. The camera lingers still on the point of impact. Legs leave the frame, dragging shadow with it, the reflection of a figure as silhouette turned over. Lingering in fragmented reflection long after it has moved on, the water continues to trickle, the disturbance absorbed.
Ferns to the waist, crashing through them. The shot widens to show a cleft filled with them. The figure wades downward, following it,
stopping. Again, we see shins submerged. A hand reaches down into the water, searching.
Emerges with a stone, the same white green as before, this time bright against the dark surrounds, held.
[1] Francis McKee, Even the Dead Rise Up, Book Works, 2017, p. 89.
MARGUERITE CARSON is an artist and writer based between Scotland and Australia. Their work considers themes of correspondence, navigation and mythmaking; often interrogating the boundaries of truth and meaning.
Edited by Juliette Berkeley.
Images courtesy of Carson.
This piece was commissioned in response to Skye Malu Baker’s exhibition A R T H ~ air and light, dust and earth ~ as part of TCB’s 2024 Emerging Writers’ Program.
The TCB Emerging Writers’ Program is generously supported by the City of Merri-Bek.
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