Image – Film Still: Performance of Seth Shed, July 2010.
Chelsea Arts Club Trust Research Fellow
Through performance, ‘happening’ and installation, using sound, text, and image – found and original, my work burrows into the realm of experience and rituality, focusing on the inevitable ceremony of the performance.
I am a fragmented storyteller. The journey from the myriad of sources that I assimilate on a day-to-day basis, to other individuals on the precipice of my work, evokes even further dendrite branches of narrative. Sequential networks grow, out of my grasp or control, through the viewers. These lines of narrative and communication fascinate and frustrate me simultaneously; the fidelity of communicative acts personally requires human intimacy. In order to avoid feelings of dissatisfaction (especially with technological communicative means), I decided that manoeuvring the work into a practice that moves and makes the initial effort to connect, through literal journeys and travel is the most effective.
The manipulation of the sources I collect, through awkward performance, (in particular song), results in personal deluded notions that I am an extreme female Harry Everett Smith; building an ethnographic (ethnomusical), cartographic…or ‘ethnomusicartographic’ archive.
website: www.barbaraelting.com
email: b.elting@hotmail.com