I’m excited to announce the cast list for my upcoming film In Transit, part of my ongoing body of work Martha [Alzheimer’s Machine III], and my new moving image commission from Random Acts Network Centre North, Lapse. Playing Martha at different points in her life are the wonderful Jane Hayward, Linda Greenwood, Sophie Boyd and Jude Nelson, with the role of Levi played by Gordon Hindson.
 
In Transit takes place over stark stages that resonate with both domestic environments and care homes. These disorienting transitional spaces are at the same time hauntingly familiar: environments in constant flux inhabited by ambiguous figures. Martha re-experiences moments of her life unfolding within her family home, from moments of personal significance to seemingly incidental memories that slowly reveal the disconnect between her perception and reality.
 
Lapse is a multi-screen installation focusing on a specific place: Martha’s garden; which is significant to Martha and connected to a number of personal memories shared with her daughter. Lapse uses this place and her experiences within it as a way to explore the impact Alzheimer’s has on the way she understands and remembers space and the difficulty she has separating the past and present; reality and artifice.
 
The work will be first exhibited in February 2018, with details to follow in the upcoming months.

Lapse has been awarded a research and development commission by Random Acts Network Centre North, based at the Tyneside Cinema. The new video installation will build on ideas around the work developed for Martha [Alzheimer's Machine III] and will be produced later this Autumn in Newcastle.

Martha [Alzheimer’s Machine III] is a series of short artist films, photographs and installation works with intersecting narratives that explore the effect Alzheimer’s disease has on the way we see, interpret and understand the world around us through the eyes of Martha, a fictional character living with AD.

Lapse is a work built around this character, and focuses on a specific place: Martha’s garden; significant to Martha and connected to a number of personal memories shared with her daughter. Lapse uses this place and her experiences within it as a way to explore the impact Alzheimer’s has on the way she understands and remembers space and the difficulty she has separating the past and present; reality and artifice. It draws a parallel between two environments – the garden itself, shot in a real outdoor location, and a constructed interpretation of the space built from scaffold, debris netting and smooth black wood paneling, dressed with a combination of real and artificial foliage.
 
The work itself will be projected onto this constructed stage across multiple screens integrated into the set. Through the footage projected onto the screens, elements of the set will appear to change, move and disappear. Through a de-construction of the replica garden environment around Martha over the course of the video, Lapse simulates her decline in spatial memory. Brief glimpses of the ‘real’ environment are juxtaposed with the replica, with the imagery and the mix of material, digital and immaterial creating a sense of uncertainty around what is real and what is not.

Through a mosaic of personal memories and sound design, the audio will create a sense of temporal disorientation, collapsing great stretches of time into a single continuous stream of memory.

Lapse will be made with support from Random Acts Network Centre North and will be exhibited in early 2018.