Swollen Stigma
A woman travels both psychically and literally in an interior space of several rooms. The film explores the space between self present cohesion and split subjectivity. The fantastical merges with claustrophobic domestic ritual. Between a rose, a tulip and a lily, flowers are lit (inspired by Virginia Woolf's 'a match burning in the crocus') eaten and destroyed. This abstracted lesbian eroticism of flower innards and fingers, is set against a sense of fragmented unease. Continuity editing dissolves into a flow of non-continuous juxtaposition of image. Tight macro shots are contrasted against wide-angle shots, and the syncopated soundtrack intermittently falls into silence.
The spectator travels a labyrinthial gaze between one woman and her visual fantasies of another woman. The dynamic of an inside and an outside is explored imagistically within this context of identity boundaries between the women. A sense of an absence in a present is established in the use of repeated action, in the semi-conscious habits of pulling at eyelashes or of the rhythm of the woman staring into space, getting up from a chair and passing from room to room. Femininity, as a construction is explored within a lesbian context where an assertion of lesbian symbolic imagery is created.
Description source: publicity materials
