Greenscreen

40 mins
In collaboration with Dorothy Feaver

Two women stripped bare – one heavily pregnant, the other not pregnant – start applying green paint to their skin from the toes upwards, until their entire bodies and faces are transformed. In a second take, their conditions switch: one is no longer pregnant, whereas the other is nearly due.

Filmed by each other over the course of a year, the women alternate between physical and emotional states, as between subject and object. The performance subsumes imagery of Sheela Na Gig, carvings of whose exaggerated pose are found near doorways in mediaeval churches, and the Green Man of legend, a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring. Although masking, the green paint also readies the image available for green screen effect, suggestive of other projections the women’s bodies are liable to be exposed to.