Living Shrine

Video 4 mins 49 sec 2020

Living Shrine out of a Liminal Space

The concept I followed throughout the project was the ‘space between’ and the ‘crossover’ into religions in Wales and Ireland. I see religion as patriarchal and the message from the first book of the Bible Genesis is about man and domination. I see the time prior to religion as matriarchal and respectful of all living things. I want to challenge the harmful narrative of winners and losers. I do not believe it is serving people, animals or the environment. We need to change the story of superiority.

I took the aspects from religion that I think closely relate to nature, such as the Shrine of Mary found in Ireland, the light that pours through Church windows and set about exploring these ideas in more depth. I imagined the moment where ‘rural’ folk walked through a Church door for the first time. How might that have felt? What does ‘sacred’ look like if it cannot be found outside anymore? There were more questions than answers but it made me think ‘What if we didn’t worship the statues, the shrines, the inanimate objects but revered ourselves, all living things? How would a Living Shrine look?

The process of making the film, the costumes, the make up, the set, the research feels more like the piece. I’m not sure I have fully resolved the film and may return to it later. I followed my playful nature and revisited parts of myself that celebrated what I loved to do as a child. Creating fantasy worlds, escaping, spontaneity, I was indeed becoming my own Living Shrine!

In the film so far I wanted to illustrate that we seem to have largely lived by this narrative of ‘male domination’ (to be clear I take this to mean ‘power over’ somebody, something, not a male person) I wanted to present an alternative to this narrative and celebrate the feminine in all Her powerful glory, with the juxtaposition of the male narrative as the accompanying sound. It is time to make them work together!