photo: Michaela Nettell
If you’ve been into the Poetry Library recently, you may have noticed someone painting on two of our large windows. Her name is Meghana Bisineer, and she’s an artist currently doing a residency here as part of the KALEID editions‘ “Art on Poetry” series. If you can visit us this week, you’ll be able to watch her drawing the final frames of a short animation film in response to the Library and the view across the Thames.
Meghana is creating this new drawn animation by painting directly onto the Library windows with black carbon ink every day, altering it bit by bit and shooting each iteration using her digital camera. The completed film will be exhibited here in August along with an artists book.
photo credit: Sarah Roesnik
While she works at the Library window, you can also see some of Meghana’s earlier films on display. These exemplify her work in creating large scale animations using windows and spaces and include a collaboration with Michaela Nettell, Window Study, and Always for the first time, with sound design by Tom Simmons. There is also a video installation called Dog which shows a large charcoal and chalk on paper animation projected onto the turning pages of an old phone book.
She describes her recent work as realising “the possibility of the window” and incorporates not just the physical window itself into the work, but also the buildings and the view behind the glass. The window to her defines the mysterious space between the inside and the outside, between emotional and physical geography. The window is intended to record the conversation between the artist and the city over a sustained period of time.
For her residency project she has taken her cue from writers who explore our relationship with places and spaces, some of them being Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Derek Jarman, and has spent a lot of time listening to the Library’s CD recording of T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land. Her starting point for this artwork has been the image of a diver. This was inspired particularly by Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, a sort of travelogue where the writer explores the UK by swimming through its various waterways. The work has taken shape from here, spilling out from a little sketchbook onto the large windows and across the landscape of the river and the City of London beyond.
You can see Meghana at work in the Poetry Library for the rest of this week, and then more sporadically until 3rd July. The finished piece will be back here on display in August as part of the ongoing “Art on Poetry” series. You can also find more of Meghana’s videos and older work online.
photo credit: Michaela Nettell
Filed under: London Literature Festival 2011, Poetry Library | 3 Comments »
