Sally Lawton

Exploring the coming together and separating out of my former self, myself as a mother, and my child during the postpartum period. The work uses reenactments, performances, and home-film to show the strangeness of time dilation, or the inability to perceive and measure time the same way.

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers – a kind of sclerosis. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary Inspired by Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, the film attempts to measure grief and consciousness in the pandemic through images and monthly recorded notes. The images were recorded entirely in the summer of 2020, while the text stacks together several years. The simple naming and showing of events exposes the banality of grief, but hopefully also the significance.

The Red Tide follows a life changing move to Florida. Exploring a new home located near famous earthworks by Robert Smithson, the enormous art collection-turned-museum of John Ringling, and beaches plagued by a toxic phenomenon called the ‘red tide’. Beginning with a recreation of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1969 film, Swamp, the film describes a confusion between multiple anxieties: art’s legacy, climate change, and a longing to stay connected. Taken From Sally Lawton's Website: http://www.sallylawton.net/the-red-tide.html

A meditation on how women traverse their own bodies, through pregnancy and the desire to be pregnant. In documenting corporeal passivity and gestures of desire, questions arise—at what stages do we recognize pregnancy and how do women’s bodies come to matter?

Glimpses of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (1495) are repainted through a VHS video mixing board.