This week’s visiting artist was Maeve Brennan, a young woman who has a documentary style of work, involving interviews, anecdotes, and most importantly, reality. She described to us how she mainly uses video but initially finds a tangeable subject, something more permanent to base her ideas off of, as “within an object there is a history” (Brennan, M. 2019) as they connect with a person or place. For herself, her initial object is usually something she has an intimacy with; her grandfather lived and worked in and around Jerusalem and the east for 20 years as an architect, giving her the inspiration she needed to travel and settle for 3 years in Lebanon.
It soon appeared that Brennan didn’t physically create a lot. Majority of her work was documentation, resulting in short 10 minute films at the end of certain periods. These videos were a collection and edit of her time away, meeting certain people and tracking her own interests and determinations whilst away. One particular film that’s remained in my head was a collection of images from her time in Bierut (ironic as we only just learnt about art, history and tourism in yesterday’s Non Western Art module), in which she visited Roman ruins in the countryside. In this clip, the nephew of the main guy, who “seemed like he was just waiting for his chance to get in the shot” (Brennan, M. 2019), silently wandered up to the camera to show off a small bug that had landed on a rock he was looking at. The innocence in the language barrier and the mutual interest in the site made this image a lasting impression in my mind; left a smile on my face too.
After the lecture I was able to catch a quick chat with Brennan in a smaller group, and discovered more about one of the guys in her video, Mohammed. He was a pretty key feature but it turned out she only met him on the last day of her trip, and all of this footage had been filmed very quickly and instinctively. She’d been on a search for keen joyriders, and came across him fixing up old cars (BMWs in particular) in the middle of nowhere. After she realised he was a natural on camera she asked about the joyriding, and off he popped with her and her camera and got this amazing footage. With her maintaining minimal intereference with the subjects, these moments of reality are captured and shared firsthand. It’s really something. I loved her take on his work too, implying that he was trying to make a BMW into a plane, all to escape the restraints he has grown up in. Seeing both her influence and the influence of her encounters on the film was quite different to any work I’d seen before, and rather heart warming.
HXLLISON ART HISTORY 