Michaela Nettell is showing a video, ‘Garden’, as part of our moving image screening on the 23rd May. It is a beautiful work that sits perfectly within our rural setting on the edge of a small market town. It reminds me of sitting on the Project Space verandah on a damp Spring morning looking out over the Scout’s makeshift garden, listening to the crows, the horses and the digging machines.
Michaela describes her work:
Garden is an experimental video produced during a twelve-month residency at Culpeper Community Garden in London. Pairs of 35mm slides are projected, overlaid and re-photographed to create double exposure effects. These photos are then sequenced to create illusions of movement.
The work describes a private experience of the public space of an urban garden, considering the balance between sociality and solitude in a site that is both collectively shared and a haven to pause and reflect. The process of layering and re-capturing the projections, zooming in and scrutinising small details within the frame, defamiliarises the environment to reveal strange and ambiguous image-worlds and establish a new, personal sense of place.
The audio is fabricated from SoundField recordings captured in the garden and neighbouring locations. Guided by duration, flicker and time passing in the image, the interleaved sounds reflect the process of double exposure and compose distances between the photographer’s lens and the bustling city around.
