Tina O'Connell

Deux Milles Feuilles

Throughout my studio practice, experimentation and documentation have become both part of the process and in some cases the outcome. Many of these pieces include time-based media that captures acts of labour and attention to the processes through which sculpture is made.

In this work, two kilometres of industrial cling film are continuously wrapped whilst being filmed. This intimate portrayal of labor, an act carried out by two female artists, relays the complexity and physical dexterity embedded within the communication between the two disconnected arms and hands which work skilfully and with grace.

The video, played back as it was shot, as a series of HD photographs, also eludes to the slow unfolding of time, drawing on ideas of temporality and permanence – our expectations of what is required for the work to be authentic.

Displayed next to the cling film ball, the video contrasts with the objects rotations that happens just outside of our eye and brains ability to read movement. Together, the work accounts for key themes in a series of works which considers labor in the context of relationships, a tenderness in relation to material which is so frequently lost from the mediated object.

Project Elements:
Film:

Single channel video (no audio) on flat screen monitor; a film shot in slow motion (HD) of two female artists wrapping 2 kilometres of upcycled clingfilm. Filmed on a stills camera and reconstructed in Post Production.

Sculpture:

Show alongside the film is a silver sphere handmade from upcycled clingfilm on an MDF plinth with a rechargable battery operated motor that rotates extremely slowly.

Detail of completed ball.