Stage

14 June – 26 July 2008
The Unitarian Church, High Street, Shrewsbury, UK

A work made for The Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery for the Charles Darwin Bicentenary. Stage was screened in a Unitarian Church on the Main Street of Shrewsbury, where the young Charles attended services with his mother until she died, when he was 8 years old.

Five video works were scattered throughout the building – in the meeting hall of worship, the tea-room, the stairwell and the scullery. Videos of marine iguanas leaving the ocean and wandering through alleyways to pause beneath a table where humans prepare lunch. A woman hunting for an octopus. A moth scientist, named Lazaro, enthusing about moths. Sally Lightfoot crabs eating the flesh through a young seals eye and a whale vertebra rocking from side to side vibrating to infinity.

The videos were shot on a trip to the Galapagos Islands during a Gulbenkian residency programme; accompanied by actor Fiona Shaw, and staying at the Darwin Research Centre.

Stage was screened above the pulpit in the hall of worship. It begins with the ancient, primal sound of the breath of a giant tortoise and cuts from nature to conversations about the im/possibility of art in such an Eden. It ends with Fiona reciting a poem by Emily Dickinson in a room full of leviathan bones.

Me from myself

Me from Myself-to banish
Had I Art-
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart- 

But since Myself – assault Me-
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness

And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication
Me – of Me?
speeding up to stillness

– Emily Dickinson