Chris Owen, My heart is a blue sea for you, treetop vines meet silver skies, 2022, video, 1 minute detail (full video 6.40 minutes) This video captures a choreography between myself and my sibling, additionally with support from my mother who stands behind the camera. The film was shot in Prior’s wood, a woodland area surrounding my family home, where I grew up near Bristol. I was reflecting on the writing of bell hooks and her ideas around love and interdependency, questioning what happens when we try to remove the binary between ourselves and another as well as binaries between ourselves and the natural landscape. I want the woodland to be seen as a protagonist, as another living body, providing multiple symbolic readings when framing these two figures sharing an intimate moment. The video consists of one frame for the duration of the film where the siblings slowly embrace and move together, resembling or reconfiguring particular western romantic paintings, such as the work of Caspar David Friedrich, where we can see particular bodies or identities interacting with the natural world and 'the sublime’. It was interesting for me to think about this particular historical context within western art and rewrite narratives through portraying a queer duo and my own transgender body in a similar stylistic way to the bodies shown in Friedrich’s paintings through composition, lighting and costume. The costume mixes various codes or symbols portraying either a new fantasy future or equally reminding the viewer of a particular past. I see the piece as a love letter to these rural areas in which I grew up along with my transfeminine body and community, the work also allowed me to orchestrate an intimate gesture between myself and my family. The audio was devised in collaboration with artist Jame St Findlay. @chrisowen__ Contributing to Cop_Art27, an online, open call exhibition of new / existing work by current art students and recent graduates. Selected work will be uploaded during the first week of COP27 (6th-13th November) to this account. A Golden Monkey Award will be announced on Sunday 13th November. More info available in first post. @rapidtransitionalliance
