Cass Fleming, Katja Hilevaara, Caoimhe McAvinchey: Depth of Field: Francesca Woodman, Photography and Performativity
Depth of Field is a collaborative practice-as-research project inspired by the life and work of photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Her work is highly performative and her photography, like performance, values disappearance as part of its condition. She presents her own body as a mode of enquiry and as a means of expression.Depth of Field is an investigation and response to the performative nature of Woodman’s work.
Francesca Woodman’s body of work consists of approximately 800 images of which only120 have been published. Most of this work was developed when Woodman was a student at Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s. Posthumously, critical engagement with Woodman’s work has been firmly located within the fields of visual art and photography.
Depth of Field engages with selected issues raised by Woodman’s oeuvre:
On being an angel - the limits of the physical frame of the body and limitless terrain of the spiritual / mystical investigated through her photography. Mischievous spectacles of disappearance. The artist / subject playing with, and questioning, notions of presence and absence, reality and fantasy. Playful exploration of the boundaries between space, light, architecture, objects and the body. Performative investigations of gender and identity. Superimposing possible past, present and future realities.
Depth of Field practically explores these questions through various performance methodologies which attempt to interrogate two dimensional images in a three dimensional live performance context. We are working with a range of primary and secondary resources including Woodman’s photographs, critical writings about her work, existing film and prose responses to her work, biography and myth.
The first research and development phase of this project will culminate in a public performance in October 2008 and co-authored journal articles which consider methodological strategies and issues surrounding practice as research.