Text From Exhibition Catalogue:
Requiem (Kalyakoorl) is a handmade 16mm cameraless film that chronicles the five month lifecycle of a field of Everlasting Daisies as they germinated, grew, flowered, died, and then reseeded in my suburban backyard. Bypassing the photographic process, I cinematically capture the embodied botanical life/death/rebirth experience by initially burying a range of 16mm film stock (found footage, coloured leader etc.) in the soil with the Everlasting seeds. Over the course of their lifecycle, every week I resurrected 168 frames of film (24 frames per day) and then collaged directly onto the soil-affected celluloid the Rhodanthe chlorosephala ssp. rosea at various stages of development (seeds, sprouts, leaves, petals, pollen etc.). Film stock covered in double-sided tape and exposed to the natural environment was also attached to stems as they grew; capturing critters, soil and other vibrant matter, as they wove their way through and over the plants, inadvertently becoming entangled into active, sensuous, collaborative agents in the filmmaking process. Daily reflection in the company of the daisies, observing their unique structure, patterns of growth, and responses to changes in their ecosystem, directly informed my choices in the overall visual arrangement, composition, and layered relationships between botanical life, their environment (and their companions).
