LOAD BEaring hips (2018)

Load Bearing hips

Load Bearing Hips (2018) is a film of legs walking and running around in a local park playing on a television that is installed on a female-like structure consisting of a wooden shelf, silver pipes and blue stilettos. 

The idea of  taking back spaces and reclaiming the night is something that is really important to me. I had been researching the amount of rapes and sexual assaults that had been happening within my local area, as it had become clear to me that it was a ridiculous amount that had been happening within running distance from my home. During the time of this research was the death of Eurydice Dixon. The response of the police to this death, pushing the blame onto women, made me and many others, really angry.  The clothes we wear, the places we walk, and the time that we are up have a direct impact on our deserving safe spaces.  That it is women’s responsibility not to get raped and murdered. 

I had been mapping the female body and investigating ways of reversing the object/subject dynamic using digital spaces in my series, Annamorphic (2018). From this a natural progression for me was to place 2 dimensional images of the female body into a 3 dimensional space. 

I  filmed my legs walking and dancing in a line in front of a green screen in my home. The video of the legs was static shot and when I removed the green screen and person, they were two dimensional moving image objects.  The space that I filmed was a back alley public parkway near my house. The camera moves through space, the point of view shot means that the viewer is the maker of action and subject. I converted this two dimensional video of a space into a three-dimensional digital space using after effects, and placed the ‘objects’ (the two dimensional individual legs) into the space.

My intention was to completely objectify these legs in virtual space and real life, private and public space. Contrasting the 3D POV/park space with the legs 2 dimensionality, both figuratively and literally, of the legs. The video portrays the fun carefree nature of the legs, running and dancing around, carefree and having fun, responding to the supposed responsibility that is a woman's burden. The park/public space is dark and ominous with a car creeping by at one point and glides surreally through this virtualised space. The installation came together when thinking of ways to present this idea. I decided to present the video on the objects that became legs and hips. The stilettos being the touch that brought it all together, making those PVC pipes into sexy legs  ;)