I’ve done a couple of films and a video art piece with artist-filmmaker Lucy Campbell. I like working with Lucy because she isn’t afraid to go to the scary places. If anything, she tends to bring me into darker and stranger worlds. I will put a link up to some of Lucy’s films too.
‘Neat as a pin’ (2008) Lucy Campbell and Helen Shanahan
This video and photographic series grew out of a live performance proposal which Lucy was developing. Lucy’s parents, in their eighties, would sew each other into a bed which they shared. The initial concept was much more savage and violent than the softer, more ambiguous film we ended up shooting together. We sent the video to a curator as an example of what was intended with the live performance, but he instead suggested exhibiting some of the stills. I still think it would be very strong as a performance piece but I like the video in itself as a separate entity. It’s truthfully more Lucy’s work than mine conceptually, but (co-incidentally) the sewing and binding of this elderly couple had a strong correlation with some work I’d done about my relationship with my partner when we were in our early twenties. For the exhibition I edited in some of this video, cross cutting with the older couple, but now I think this was overkill, and the ‘bed’ film as we called it was much better by itself.
