Welter (2021)
Single channel video
Exhibition history 2023 Visions in The Nunnery, Bow Arts, London, UK (group); Shape Arts (online)
extract
Welter, made in collaboration with Victoria Gray, deliberately exploits ambiguity; of language, form, and meaning. Welter - both verb and noun - is a slippery and tense concept, evoking imagery of a writhing, messy, distress.
Welter is looking to reflect on the ways in which autistic sensory experience can enrich - and conflict with - contemporary performance and visual arts practice, as well as, more abstractly, reflect on the power and limitations of traditional linguistic communication.
Informed by lived experience of stimming movements, Victoria repeats patterns of motions and postures that at times are rhythmic and wavelike and at others sharper, more staccato.
'Inside this migrainous welter, I feel a dark delay. A hole opens in the back of my head, and all of the tacit connections that ground a body in space-time, that galvanise a sense of self, fall out of that hole. Gravity works on me diagonally. With every movement, shift of eyeline, and change in light, I multiply in the turbulence, zig-zagging backwards out of my body, like driving over a poorly surfaced road or the uncanny echo in the legs when stepping off an escalator.'
A film by Sam Williams and Victoria Gray
Camera: Sam Williams
Performance: Victoria Gray
Edit: Sam Williams and Victoria Gray
Sound score: Sam Williams
Sound post production: Jonathan Webb
Supported by Arts Council England, ArtsAdmin Artists' Bursary, Shape Arts