Limerick, Ireland
Susan MacWilliam, Headbox, 2004, 3 TV tubes with video

Susan MacWilliam

b. 1969, Ireland

Incorporating research into the fields of psychical research, psychology, physiology, photography and optical viewing devices MacWilliam’s practice explores ideas about the visible and the invisible. The works explore ideas about the presentation and credibility of an image, and ideas about vision and perception, reality and illusion. The practice involves the investigation of particular individual case histories and myths. Perceptual phenomena, paranormal activity and eyeless sight are amongst the phenomena explored.

Headbox presents a series of three video works housed in a purpose-built plywood construction. The videos present images based on the case of Rosa Kuleshova, a young Russian woman whose remarkable ability to read with her fingertips made her the subject of intense scientific observation in Russia in the 1960s. Various devices were employed during the investigation of her eyeless sight (dermo-optical perception). Blacked-out goggles were worn, large paper collars were placed around Rosa’s neck, and tables with screens with holes in them for her arms to pass through were used to ensure that it was Rosa’s fingers that were doing the ‘seeing’.

This scientific research has been reinterpreted though a series of videos. As if re-enacting Kuleshova, a figure is seen working at a table. Her hands pass through a plywood screen and cut into archival images of Rosa Kuleshova. These are manipulated, and glued to create card and paper models of Rosa as a subject of experimental research. The figure in the video sits behind the screen, her eyes blocked off from what her hands create. Headbox reflects the artist’s interest in the contraptions and paraphernalia employed by the scientists during their experiments. The work focuses on apparatus and fabrication.

(Text: OPEN e v + a catalogue, 2005)

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