THE GROTTO
The Grotto (2024) is a video installation. It consists of a painted backdrop measuring 14’ wide by 8’ high, video (live-feed and prerecorded) projected on the backdrop, a small electronic water wheel, and sound.
This work contemplates the grotto, specifically the artificial garden grotto - most popular in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. These grottoes resemble caves, with the addition of fountains, sculptures of nymphs and Greek and Roman gods, automata such as mechanical singing birds, and are often encrusted with seashells and corals from Western Africa and the West Indies.
The statuary from ancient Rome and Greece (or reproductions thereof), symbolised an intellectual and cultural throughline from classical antiquity to Renaissance Europe. The inclusion of shells and corals, etc., from Europe’s new colonial outposts supported the perception that Europe’s colonial efforts were part of this cultural bedrock of Western European civilization.
The Grotto touches upon the garden grotto’s place in colonial history through parody and repetition. It is part painting and part projection - a fiction. Classical nymphs (played by myself) lounge disinterestedly on their smartphones. A crude mechanical bird keeps time like a cuckoo clock until it unceremoniously drops dead, only to reappear seconds later. A painting of a bust of a Classical goddess flips up and down in time with the strum of a harp. A marionette with billowing green hair intermittently plays the conch trumpet, summoning the image of a spinning shell from the center cavity. In front of this video installation, a small mechanical water wheel pushes shells and paper boats in circles. This water sculpture is filmed with a webcam. The live-feed video is projected onto the bottom half of the video installation. Sounds of bells, water, birds, harps and conch horns fill the air. The colour palette of The Grotto slowly shifts, cycling through both dark and light palettes. Pulling from my experience as a painter, I used colour theory to optically mix the colours in my painting with those of my mapped video projection. Here, the bright reds in my painting read as deep purplish-greys when overlaid with the turquoise light of my projection, and so on.