Still from looped video ‘Infinite Descent’
‘Safe Light´ is a performance and large scale photographic work created as a critical personal response to influential historic works from photographic, painting, performance and moving image histories – including Edward Muybridge’s studies of human locomotion, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Stairs no.2 (1912) and Franko B’s performance ‘I miss you’ (1999-2005).
The artist’s slow descent and feminine bloodletting are recorded with multiple exposures of light and shadow down each flight of a long carpet of photographic paper, her passage traced in bloody footsteps , abstracted shadows and illuminations of the stairwell’s architecture.
Photographed and digitally reassembled in collaboration with Wellcome’s photography team Thomas Farnetti and Benjamin Gilbert, this large scale photographic print is divided into 7 ‘flights’, forming an epic photographic record of the performance.
Created at a pivotal moment in the artist’s life, this work aims to critically respond to persistent dominance of male narratives and reframe female experience, age and the body in relationship with analogue photographic processes .