2010 – Suky Best

54 Morning Lane

frame The sitting room at night3 — frame from 54 Morning Lane: the sitting room at night

2010, small monitor installation, each 1 min 30 secs (approx) looping with sound

Four scenes each just over a minute long showing a collage of filmed owls placed on top of a scene from a British film of the 1940’s (This Happy Breed 1941). In each scene owls appear and disappear. The work comes from ideas of transgressive animals within children’s fiction, especially Beatrix Potter’s, A Tale of Two Bad Mice, 1902 where two mice enter a dolls house, and, finding all the food to be fake, smash it up in anger and disappointment
The room, a film set, is used as a constructed fictional space, like a dolls house but for adults. The collage is deliberately crude to allow a space for the viewer to fill in the gaps and make the scene more real; what they are watching isn’t real.

54 Morning Lane (2010)

These are the birds that live in the house. An ordinary house where you, or I, could be live. When no one is looking they appear, becoming visible in the empty spaces; when your back is turned.

These are the real inhabitants.

They have always been there.

There since the space was enclosed by bricks; displaced from their trees, resentful.

Living in the walls, the cracks between, having a life amongst us. In moments of despair they can become visible to us, but we don’t notice.

When the house is empty they come out to play.

When our backs are turned they help themselves.

Camouflaging themselves against wallpaper, merging with the patterns, in control of their opacity.

And

Always angry, they change the space just by being there.

Eating cake, biting at the backs of chairs ill tempered and bad mannered.

If you don’t believe me, perhaps you just haven’t looked hard enough.

An Observation of Flight

1 min 20 seconds, looping 4:3 PAL with sound, to be projected as large as possible in portrait format

A 4:3 ratio animation turned through 90º to be projected on a wall.
This work is about flight and as such the verticality of the content needs to be emphasised by the form of the work. The work begins and ends on black, this is so it can loop repeatedly. The looping gives the work greater presence; it’s more of an extended picture than an animation. It has a structure but no story.
It plays over and over. A fragment of film, alluding to something much longer, the whole life of a bird spent inside a box at the behest of the scientists observing it. Although the bird is small it takes up the entire area, and can move in any direction.
Nothing else can or will use this enclosure

This piece was commissioned by artisancam, the process of its construction can be seen on the artisancam website: view here