"To identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse discourse that uncritically imitates the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms."

Judith Butler

Instead of offering a different set of terms.

My artwork holds in parallel the personal and the socio-political. These short film scenes depict domestic and intimate family exchanges: fragments of personal stories illustrate the socialised learning we endure as citizens of our families, communities, and cultures and implicate societal groups, ideologies, power relations, manipulations, and coercions, as a whole.
I am interested in the inscription of a given orientation on our bodies as an ingredient of indoctrination. What can you tell about a family’s relationships through body language and positioning at the dinner table? What has a daughter already learned about her own body when, even with no one else present, she cannot move her body with impropriety? What does a son learn about his position in the family when his big brother wrestles him to the ground? And, what do these members carry into their roles outside the home? What do they embody in their profession, in their gender, and in relation to others? And, what world do we then build networked together as a collective?

Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it

Part 1 of a 6 part video installation. Performed by Abigail Tomlinson. Sound by Bill Daggs

Raise up your child in the way he should go

The Parable of the Grounded Woman portrays the physical body as a social and political symbol and addresses the constructions of subjectivity that the body takes on in the social context. Pulling from Elisabeth’s experiences in the American Evangelical church and Heba’s within the Muslim faith, The Parable of the Grounded Woman appropriates religious texts and the social order derived from them.

Parables are a story form that were used by Jesus in his ministry on earth: they are didactic and conclusive – prescribing morality and drawing a dividing line between the righteous and damned. The Parable of the Grounded Woman follows a traveler, isolated by choice who trains herself to live by a river and to learn how to navigate and survive. It is a parable that is existential, humanistic, and cyclical: utilising symbols from religious texts, the film narration is a repetitive cycle of triumph, defeat, sorrow, self-hate, anger, numbness. Culminating in resilience and routine as the singular character rows down the river and returns home every day. The moral principle is confusion as demonstrated in the acting, feeling, and living of this woman.

(Excerpt) The Parable of the Grounded Woman

Performed by Joseph and Elisabeth Tomlinson

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