{"id":1971,"date":"2011-03-09T16:02:54","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T15:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/?p=1971"},"modified":"2025-12-24T09:46:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T08:46:21","slug":"my-mum-v2-sensitive-beaconsfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/my-mum-v2-sensitive-beaconsfield\/","title":{"rendered":"My Mum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Beaconsfield, London <a href=\"https:\/\/beaconsfield.ltd.uk\/projects\/my-mum\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u2192<\/a><br \/>\n9 Mar \u2013 25 Mar 2011<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 100%; height: 1px; background: #333333; font-size: 0;\">&#8211;<\/div>\n<p>exhibited work:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/?p=1120\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-content\/uploads\/My-Mum-V2-Sensitive.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"520\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/130925444?autoplay=0&amp;loop=0&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"520\" height=\"393\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/?p=1120\">My Mum (V2-Sensitive)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 100%; height: 1px; background: #333333; font-size: 0;\">&#8211;<\/div>\n<p>gallery information:<\/p>\n<p>Running across the Beaconsfield site in all three gallery spaces, Mark Dean\u2019s recent &#8220;Phase&#8221; exhibition, <a href=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/?p=1372\">The Beginning of The End<\/a>, offered a pause for mid-career reflection upon all aspects of the journey within the artist\u2019s oeuvre. On 3 February Mark delivered a paper for the Beaconsfield talks series Art &amp; Compromise, in the course of which he showed a new work, made during the exhibition period. He told us:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe work perhaps began in 1997, when I was making <a href=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/?p=34\">Goin\u2019 Back (The Birds\/The Byrds x 32 + 1)<\/a>, and in a way it\u2019s a version 2 of that work. It was Goin\u2019 Back which began my process of combining unrelated sources via the device of a shared name or some other conceptual connection (which, by the way, I have since discovered is a classical rabbinic method of interpreting scripture).<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve always loved Hitchcock\u2019s extended scene of Tippi Hedren sitting smoking as The Birds gradually gather behind her, and I knew I wanted to work with it one day. Then last year I bought a beautiful little <a title=\"Emmanuelle de la Lubie: My Mum (2010)\" href=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-content\/uploads\/emmanuelle-my-mum.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">drawing<\/a> by Emmanuelle de la Lubie that I saw in her studio, of a woman smoking, entitled \u2018My Mum\u2019. Then just the other day I saw Manon de Boer\u2019s <a title=\"Manon de Boer: Sylvia Kristel \u2013 Paris (2003)\" href=\"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-content\/uploads\/sylvia-kristel-smoking.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">film<\/a> of Sylvia Kristel smoking (at the South London Gallery) and my heart started to burn within me (that is always the real catalyst for creative invention, I find) and I thought, right \u2013 that\u2019s it \u2013 I\u2019m going home to make that work I\u2019ve been thinking about for so long.<\/p>\n<p>First I cut out the scene from &#8216;The Birds&#8217;, and edited it to leave just the shots of Tippi Hedren. Then I started to play around with some music, as is my custom, and eventually dug out a little sound piece that I had made last year for Andy Holden\u2019s artist\u2019s music festival \u2018Be Glad For The Song Has No End\u2019, where I had been asked to DJ. I remember at the time I felt I had spent far too long making this music, because it wasn\u2019t really art &#8211; it didn\u2019t have enough conceptual rigour to it. It consisted of the intro to David Bowie\u2019s \u2018Memory of a Free Festival\u2019, which I segued into Lou Reed\u2019s \u2018Berlin\u2019, which I then mixed with The Field Mice\u2019s \u2018Sensitive\u2019. It sounded good, but I didn\u2019t know what it meant. When I put this on the audio track of the edited video, and played it back, I liked how they worked together, but I still didn\u2019t know what it meant. In order to find out, I had to compromise with my own sense of how art should be made &#8211; to let it manifest itself, without any prior conceptual justification.<\/p>\n<p>As I watched it, I first noticed that the sound and the image began to make formal sense, as choreography. Then I began to see that this choreography performed a narrative that could be read in relation to my mother\u2019s life.<\/p>\n<p>My mother? Let me tell you about my mother. She grew up in the war, a time that damaged a lot of people. I remember her telling me about the V2 bombs, how scary they were, and how she missed her father who was in the Air Force. After the war she was engaged to a pilot, and a few days before their wedding day he was killed in a plane crash. When she found out, she didn\u2019t stop screaming until the doctor was called and gave her a shot. I don\u2019t think she ever had any other support in coming to terms with her loss. The vicar just told her she had nothing to do with the funeral because they had not been married. She never had anything to do with the church after that. Later in her life she tried to take her own life, and suffered an extended period of severe mental illness. She basically pulled herself through on tenacity and cigarettes. She was a beautiful woman.<\/p>\n<p>My mother died of emphysema a couple of years ago, and during her slow decline into breathlessness, it seemed foolish to pray for her breath when I knew her lungs were failing, but at the same time, I couldn\u2019t do otherwise\u2026 so I used to pray for her <em>pneuma<\/em>, meaning both wind and spirit. I was with her when she died, and just before she drew her last breath, I saw her face change in an amazing way &#8211; I believe I glimpsed what St Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15: <em>So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beaconsfield, London<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":17547,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[102,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-selected-exhibitions","category-solo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1971"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24746,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971\/revisions\/24746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}