REBECCA WATERSTONE

Lumière

here/there was screened at Mount Vic Flicks vintage cinema, as well as in Mount Victoria Manor, and as part of the digital online program of Lumière: Festival of the Moving Image, 2022 Lumière Website Additional screenings were held at Mount Vic Flicks as part of MAPBM art-film event Rest/Less (2022), and at Shades, an experimental contemporary art space underneath Central Station, run by the Golden Age Cinema, Sydney in 2023.

The dialogue between the two films, which were made in the Blue Mountains, Australia, and the Isle of Skye, Scotland, merges and blurs realities, depicting the liminal experience of living between one place physically, and another in mind and heart, with the motif of mountains binding the films’ visual narratives. The pull, and yearning for a special place and the people in it - when located in another, is profound. The spoken word is a reading of a (fictional) British Shipping Forecast. Folk tune in late at night to hear the mellifluous tones of the broadcaster reading the forecast. It acts as a reassuring anchor, or lullaby, conjuring romantic images of life at sea on the wild coastlines of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, while listeners rest safe and dry in their beds, or by a warm fireplace. This is another way of experiencing two opposing realities at once. Often describing elemental, tempestuous, potentially life-threatening weather outside, it is also a fitting metaphor for the experience of being in a protected, nourishing place physically, while searching for a way to ride out the internal storms of aching for loved ones, navigating uncertainty and coping with enforced distance that tears at the soul.

Over the course of 15 years, I moved in and out of these states of overlapping realities - living in two places at once. I was simultaneously present in one place, while in another in my head and heart. This duality was both intensely rich and nourishing, living two lives, while also creating a heightened sense of angst, longing, uncertainty and limbo.

These films establish a third, merged reality that can be observed from a safe distance from the reality. I made the work to bring this experience outside of myself, transforming it into external matter, giving respite to my mind and heart, whilst also enabling others to experience it. Making my internal states into separate, tangible external entities was an attempt to unravel and understand the tangled complexities of this existence, and navigate more freely between the dichotomous states - two hemispheres, two continents, two states of being, two full lives of families, friends and places. The mingling of images and sound, alternately fusing or pulling in opposite directions, embodies the tensions inherent in living simultaneously in multiple worlds.