We Used to Kiss All Night:
An Evening of Moving Images from Lauren Gault, Amanda Rice & Patrick Hough
18 November 2021 - 19:00
Pálás Cinema, Galway
We Used to Kiss All Night draws together three Irish artists and filmmakers who employ different tactics in their work to complicate dominant narratives around how we might think towards different kinds of bodies across vast stretches of space and time. With a focus on various kinds of geological transformation and excavation, these films offer up new ways to connect moments in our deep past to our unsteady, uncertain present.
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Lauren Gault
losing you, 2015, 21 min
Lauren Gault’s film losing you explores the National Museum of Irelands’ ‘bog butter’ collection in Dublin. It is a close study of the surfaces of these uncanny historical artefacts, looking for traces of human touch and presence which appear in the form of fingerprints, stray hairs and other corporeal detritus caught within these creamy plains.
Within this work Gault considers the bog butter as a bridge of sorts, or a connective in time, where something that we could describe as ‘fresh’ (unspoiled and lasting) is impossibly stretched. For the artist, this bog buttery ‘freshness’ has a feeling, making for a very precise encounter of vitality, recognition and exchange. This same ‘freshness’ was present hundreds of years ago when an individual or group buried this butter (in a wooden, bark or animal skin casing), either to take advantage of the fridge-like microclimate of Ireland’s peat bogs, or for more ritualistic or sacrificial purposes. Unearthed again, often clumsily or by accident, this freshness is somehow replayed in the present, like a voice speaking distinctly, nearby.
Amanda Rice
Death in Geological Time, 10 min, 2018 (+ an excerpt of a new work in progress)
Amanda Rice’s Death in Geological Time is a short, experimental film work which touches upon themes of death, time and authenticity relative to our current geological epoch, the Anthropocene.
The film is set at LifeGem Laboratories, a manufacturer which utilizes high pressure, high temperature technologies (HPTP) as means of producing gem-grade synthetic diamonds from the cremated ashes of human remains. Narrated by ‘the company’s managing director’, the process and product itself is illustrated as a unique means of memorialising a deceased loved one – as a diamond. The work takes the form of a pseudo advertisement, or a slow and languid geological horror which reveals industrial ingenuity at its most absurd.
Following this work will be an in-progress glimpse into the artist’s new film which is currently in the final stages of production, working towards a premiere in 2022.
Patrick Hough
The Black River of Herself, 27 mins, 2021
The title of Patrick Hough’s The Black River of Herself is lifted from the poetry of Seamus Heaney – a body of writing steeped in history that is keenly attuned to the subliminal influences that permeate a landscape and shape a particular place. A stark and indelible memento mori, the bog body is also a reminder of an enduring continuum: the dark river of our ancestral DNA, flowing submerged for untold generations, now suddenly surfacing, frozen in time, as if from the depths of the collective unconscious; a revenant from the past, manifesting, like an omen, in the present.
In Hough’s film, a female bog body is uncovered at the site of a dig. Like a person lying prostrate at the scene of an accident, she is unable to move but fully able to speak. The archaeologist/surveyor who has been delegated to recover her listens matter-of-factly at first, then comfortingly and increasingly attentively, as her meandering monologue moves on from an account of her individual fate to a premonition of a tragedy awaiting the contemporary environment – her ageless senses instantly alerted to changes in air temperature, and the presence of alien micro-particles. Beautifully scripted by novelist Daisy Hildyard, the film’s wry, saturnine exchanges are disarmingly affectionate and genuinely affecting: the flesh and bones of a subtle and haunting piece of filmmaking that lingers powerfully in the mind. — Steve Bode