One year after we first aired The Stare, I sit, considering my artist’s statement for the latest incarnation.  Since the first showing I have snipped and cropped and elongated and layered and expanded and contracted – both my work and myself.  Last year’s statement is an artefact I feel worth re-sharing so I will only add this:

I will keep being brave and strive to unapologetically allow each draft of myself to be seen.  I will stare back in full vulnerability and I will not cast my eyes down or away from you. Here is my work.  Here is myself.

Statement from The STARE 2022:

Practising bravery while living with an escaped sense of self is an intricately faceted beast.  Second Echo has offered me a place to explore a new work that focuses on my sense of self and place, while pushing me to bravely put forward ideas and work that I would normally keep tucked up my sleeves and behind the jars of cardamom pods and ground cloves with the cobwebs.  The story hovering here is a work in progress – not a neat, heavily edited finished product but an almost-sort-of first draft that I would not ordinarily air for people to critique.  As artists we are told to be brave, make mistakes (as this is where the most fruitful work is often found) to fail and fail again to find the best of our craft.  And yet, here I am, overthinking my artist’s statement.  This is about my fifth try.  So instead of trying to explain, here I am, transparent and floating in an enclosure and intangible to grasp, projected on the wall.  I give you your interpretation, unhindered by my need to be understood or found.

This work consists of a long glass fish tank filled with saltwater with nine pieces of suspended acetate with pictures of Bryony captured in various movement gestures. The fish tank sits atop a black wooden plinth. There is a small wooden crate in front of the tank with a seashell and a wooden spoon, both covered in salt. There is also a salt lamp to the left of the aquarium which radiates a warm glow and there are two kelp anchor roots sitting next to the lamp.

The second part of Bryony's installation is in the adjacent space to the left with a giant wooden carved hand and wrist sculpture, the size of a small chair with a cluster of pink and white barnacles nestled in the palm of the hand.  There is another salt lamp at the base of the hand sculpture on the left hand side, radiating a warm glow. On the back brick wall is a projection of a woman in muted sepia tones as if looking through an old vaseline camera lens where the outlines are blurred. The woman moves in and out of the frame in silhouette.

There are also the words of Bryony’s story about an ocean who made herself smaller also projected on the wall.