DOKU.
Before we parted ways the next morning at the Port of Tyne, Cindy handed me a small pamphlet, printed on soft, heavy paper. On the cover was a drawing of a woman walking in a snowstorm, face half-covered, hair and scarf blown out behind her, pine trees crowning the horizon overhead. In the top left corner was the name DORIS and in the snow at the bottom right #8. Some of the stories inside were handwritten, others typed out on typewriters or drawn as comic strips. All of them were hers. These stories were secrets shared, small human stories from her life among punks and anarchists, moments of beauty and kindness, lostness and brokenness and mending, intercut with stories that retraced younger experiences, trying to make sense of the things she had done and had done to her. Much of it was beyond my experience, places I’d never been, things I’d never even heard anyone talk about. She wrote like she was writing a letter to a friend, then she printed these letters and gave them away.
My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic—like with my film Bending to Earth (2015), which shows a uranium field. But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line. I’m also interested in the unstableness of knowledge, and in what we as human beings want when we try to reach beyond knowledge, and in how we want to inscribe ourselves.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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