I work with video and space to create interventions, reactions to place that are site-responsive or resonate with a sense of place or place less. I’m interested in why we move and what this essential place is that we all navigate from – this landscape, our interior landscapes and the places we set our feet upon.  There is a place where the experience is related to touch, it is up close and you sense it, this ‘live-ness’ (aliveness), where senses and touch exist in other folds of life, a smell, a word, a moment recorded, written, given. You are moved when you had not meant to be. The body is my informant, text is my confidant and complicit to my whims and emotions, ‘site’ and what is made in sympathy there are the resonances that inform and press themselves upon me, new, undiscovered memories, dreams and phantoms to perambulate around my knees. To recognise these as moments of beauty where something else happens, something that takes you out of yourself (un-selfing) and of finding ways to relocate it back into the world.

This installation, the history of small rooms, for Mivart Open Studios Fabricated exhibition asks the viewer to stand in the place where you are not standing. The views witnessed have been collected from this sightline or standing point. These are the view that can be found beyond these walls.

I am fascinated by the view and what happens to the view when we do not bear it witness. Does it still exist without us? Does the view also look upon us; a view to behold with longing, with recollection, with tenderness?

I stand in the view and know that the view is here without me.

melshearsmith@blueyonder.co.uk
http://melshearsmith.blogspot.com/
http://imtryingnottomisseverything.blogspot.com