still life: nature morte

Video installation comprising freestanding steel wall approx 4m x 3m; surface of the steel treated with thick impasto of engineering grease; projected on to surface: video of rabbit being skinned in close and minute detail; 3-camera shoot; 23 mins looped. First shown as a screened work in Dérapage Controle, Montreal (November 2001) and later also presented in FIX’02, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (December 2002).

Part of Bourke’s continuing enquiry into ‘scenographies of the felt’, ‘still life: nature morte’ is one of a series of video installations that draws on the Still Life tradition and attempts to rework relationships between object, materiality and video image. A concern of the series (which also includes ‘Dark Bride’ and ‘BlackDog’) is the materiality of the play of light and sound on surface. Each work centres upon a single object and examines the complexities that emerge from the result - or ‘aftermath’ - of certain simple actions wrought upon it. Works attempt to occupy a field of sensory experience in which the visual merges with one’s sense of one’s own body: of touch, movement, space and proximity. Thereby, they question the adequacy of conventional delineations of sense perception, and explore what differentiates the lived-out moment from other cognitive experiences invoked by iconography, representation, memory, narrative etc.

‘still life: nature morte’ was presented in ‘Against Nature’ (12/10/02-3/11/02), an exhibition curated and staged by Kunsthalle Faust, also including work by: Tomasz Wendland, Arec Ignaszek (Poland); Liu Guangyun, Qui Ping (China); Richard Bond (UK); Csilla Babinszky (Hungary); Nina Kovacheva, Valentin Stefanoff (Bulgaria); Anna Grunemann (Germany); and Risa Takita (Japan). As a direct result of his participation, Bourke was subsequently invited to present work in ‘Facing Nature’, Centre for Contemporary Art and Media, Poznan (March 2003).