Once Upon a Time, Long Ago and Far Away: Shutting Down in Isolation, 2020, video 4’15”
This work is a short succinct video. It is a fairy tale, that is being read as if the audience is transitioning between being awake and being asleep, being awake or being anesthetised, being alive or being dead. It is read to the rhythm of that time and space focusing on the isolating impact in the contemporary pandemic and the temporal and liminal nature of the patient’s and their family’s experience of hospital, ICU and being excluded from ICU.
This work references The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman. It is a remaking. In this remaking the script of a fairy tale is set within the liminal spaces of the transition from home to hospital and the transition from life to death. We also experience this state of transition. We also experience the liminal internal and external spaces of waiting and fail to see or unsee the figure of Death.
As Eve Sullivan from Artlink wrote in her online review dated 8th Dec 2020;
More focused on communicating the facts through bold storytelling, a work by Fiona Davies from her series Blood on Silk, Shutting Down in Isolation, extends the reference to the progress of the pandemic, drawing on Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Davies’ narrative voiceover in this work accompanies the view of a large gloved hand placing, turning and replacing wrapped toy figures on trestle blocks as hospital beds drawing on the artist’s recent research into death and dying in an ICU. Less a fairytale than a blow-by-blow account of what to expect based on what is currently being played out in hospitals around the world as the infection rates once again surge, this dramatically simple but impactful work lends its weight to the “techno-scientific upsurge” overlapping the sociopolitical crises that Pandilovski argues is the media message for now.’tever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Exhibition History:
2021 17th Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece,
2020 International Limestone Coast Video Art Festival at the Mount Riddoch Art Centre, Mount Gambier, South Australia.
2020 Shift + Control + Exit The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Katoomba Australia.