Déjà vu is a disorienting phenomenon, in which a recollection of the present coincides with the present itself, a momentary disjuncture in the flow of memory and time.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) redefined the very nature of time. He viewed ideas of past, present and future as mere concepts, static representations of pure Duration. In Bergson’s account of time, past and present co-exist and are always already in the act of becoming-future and becoming-past. Time is not chronological.
Since what is real is continual change, form exists only as a snapshot of transition. Our intellect tends to solidify this fluid continuity of the real; the method by which we attach ourselves to the illusion of form is through the creation of a constant stream of internal images.
These matters go right to the heart of Fiona O’Dwyer’s work, Strange the rooms we’ve all lived in. In a play between duration, movement and form the artist pursues a strategy of repetition and endless return. At the centre of the work she has placed a set of moments and objects/images; these have been turned over and over, picked apart, troubled and worried by the artist, subjected to a variety of processes and practices, staged and re-staged as a series of events.
The work is permeated by the spectre of a film I Was Happy Here (1965). Scripted by Edna O’ Brien, starring Sarah Miles and Cyril Cusack, it was shot entirely on location in Co. Clare and London, unusual for the time. The film is a straightforward piece of narrative cinema - the heroine, a young woman, leaves Co. Clare for London and marries, but is not happy. After some years, she returns to Co. Clare but finds that she no longer belongs, that the former happiness she imagined eludes her.
O’Dwyer was drawn to the film initially because of her interest in the mechanics of film-making and the impact that the making of this film had had on the local area: what it had brought (employment, excitement, magic, pride, glamour) and what it had left behind - props and paraphernalia from the film that had found their way into people’s homes; places that had been rendered exotic through their re-framing as ‘locations’.
Her research led O’Dwyer to an original wooden ‘set’ that had been used in the film. Relocated from the shed where it had been stored for 40 years to her own garden, this set became a ‘strange room’, full of narrative and cinematic resonances that began to call up aspects of the artist’s own autobiography. Her response was performative – she started to insert herself retrospectively into the film, albeit a version of the film that had never existed, constructing new props from her own collection of family objects. The resulting works superimpose layers of time, fiction, history and personal memory.
What comes through Strange the rooms we’ve all lived in is the artist’s tireless pursuit of something both imagined and unimaginable. She wonders if the world was a different colour in 1967. She has pored over photographs from the time, isolating small sections in which patches of colour seem to vibrate on a different wavelength. Employing a laborious four-colour intaglio photo-etching process, she has set out, not to reproduce images but to remake those vibrations of colour as she imagines they might have been.
The resulting etchings appear both as prints, and as projections onto objects, sites, buildings. Projection is thematically and technically important to O’Dwyer, and she returns again and again to a method of projecting images and films out of doors onto gable walls. She has described the resulting movement-images as being “full of air” but they are also penetrated by the world, by the textures and materials of the walls they temporarily animate.
This working and reworking of the image blurs boundaries between memory and matter, between fiction and reality, between this place and all places. O’Dwyer’s method of working does not fix the image but destabilises it, opening it up to flux, to shifting relations of visibility. Neither space nor time is privileged in this fluid continuity of the real.
Fiona Woods
July 2009
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