'Full Immersion' Short film created as a direct response to the site of the house.
The film is situated within a cupboard recess in Jane Austen's bedroom.
Installation views.
SUBTEXT is a contemporary art show by the MA Fine art artists from UCA Farnham responding to Jane Austen's writings, life and socio-political histories to present day. Among the collection of fascinating artefacts belonging to Jane Austen and her family, thirteen artworks are sited throughout the hose, in the dining room, bedroom, legacy room, family room, bakehouse, drawing room, kitchen and stairwell.
Within this intimate space will be found drawing, painting sculpture, print, installation and film exploring personal fictions, female sexuality and desire, the museum collection and house, materiality and representations of nature.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jane Austen’s
House Proposal – Julia Keenan.
Digital Short Film with Collage Overlays, 5:53. Looped.
Partial Sound.
2022
'Full Immersion'
‘The Poetics of Space is a 1957 book by French
architect and design theorist Gaston Bachelard. A seminal fusion of the
phenomenologist school of philosophy that found its prominence in the
mid-twentieth century and architectural theory, Bachelard elucidates a theory
of architectural design that incorporates the intended lived experience and a
site’s natural context into its form and function.
Bachelard next systematically dismantles the conception of
the house that predominates in his time. He begins by surveying the rooms that
typically make it up. Usually, a house lives on an axis formed by two poles,
the attic and the cellar. Because there is a pole, he holds that a concept of
inner movement presides both in a human mind and its domestic life. Further,
Bachelard explicates the meaning of objects stored in a home: objects such as
dressers and wardrobes symbolize the storage of secret information. To
strengthen this argument about the continuity of the inner life and the lived
form, he points out formal similarities between the reading nook and the animal
den, bird nest, and shells of sea creatures.’
https://www.supersummary.com/the-poetics-of-space/summary/
Context
The sea is a recurring motif in many of Austen’s novels, as
a symbol of transformation, escapades and alluding to sexuality. Her last and
unfinished work ‘Sanditon’ puts the fictional seaside resort at the centre
stage within which the narrative unfolds.
I was interested to learn of Austen’s creative life within
this home of women, where the supportive female environment allowed creativity
and freedom of expression for its inhabitants.
Austen wrote from a women’s perspective, her characters and
their relationships often providing a gentle yet focused satire on expectations
and social boundaries constraining women of the era.
This short film aims to bring references from the outside
world – the sea and bucolic scenes from the Hampshire countryside into the
house. The recurring motif of the Moon which appears throughout is suggestive
not only of its influence on the ocean tides but of the synchronicity in terms
of female monthly cycles.
On our research visit I was fascinated by the large Fig tree
dominating one of the walls in the garden, this has also been represented along
with apple trees within the narrative of the work.
Figs can only ripen within a certain set of circumstances,
and it is interesting to compare this to the ripening of potentiality which
obviously flourished within the setting of the house. [the write conditions]
Footage used has been gathered on my phone from the English
seaside, Hampshire fields and within the house itself. The narrative moves
between the outside and the inside playing with speed, sound and manipulated
perspective, this deliberate intervention is to allude to a non-linear timeline
reminiscent of the strange and surreal nature of memory and dreams.
This work is hoping to evoke the phenomenology of nature and
the environment reaching into the thoughts and imagination of Jane within her
creative space.
The intention is to project the film directly onto the four-poster
bed within the room known as ‘Jane’s Bedroom’ [if possible].
Projecting onto her ‘bed’ as a metaphor for creativity, eroticism, and dreams. The projection on the folded fabric will add to the ephemeral and subjective nature of this work.
https://vimeo.com/691034862/8399a0b412
