Lindsay Seers

A Woman’s Place | Knole, Seven Oaks, Kent

17th May - 4th November 2018

Knole, Seven Oaks, Kent

 

Materials: website with HD screens divided in to three segments.

Artists: Lubaina Himid, CJ Mahony, Lindsay Seers, Emily Speed, Alice May Williams & Melanie Wilson

Curated by Lucy Day & Eliza Gluckman

Seven contemporary art commissions highlight the progression towards equality through the stories of women who have contributed to the spirit & history of Knole.

Lindsay Seers' commission involves an on-line work to be viewed after a visit to Knole. Cards in Knole visitor's centre lead visitors to the website address where chapters of a work are hosted. Often viewed on iPhones the work implicitly infers how we construct identities for ourselves and others through remote devices (how much this form creates a problematised self).

The work was initially inspired by the handwritten manuscript of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, dedicated to Vita-Sackville West that is held at Knole in Kent. Orlando text is an encoded and mythical biography of Vita Sackville-West and is referred to as a love letter to Vita. There are many descriptions of Knole in the novel.
Seers' draws on this text and the biographies of Virginia and Vita, passing them through a living protagonist – an actor Sara Sugarman who like Vita dressed as a boy as a child/young woman and had elicit affairs with women. The lives of all three (and even Seers as the film maker) entwine and divide in a layered work which takes a notion (which Virginia expounds in Orlando) that in a life time we embody two thousand and fifty-two versions of ourselves – and thoughts are layered in the mind seventy-six times at any given moment. This image-text work evokes the melancholy and ecstasy of what it is to be human with the caveat of what it is to live (and die) through war (WWII) and psychosis (Sugarman and Woolfe)
Using text, sound and image the work is a hybrid book/film.

www.2052selves.com

Animation by Keith Sargent and Lindsay Seers, filming, edting and post production Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent, sound by Lindsay Seers, Pendle Poucher, David Dhonau and Rick and Vanessa Koster-Goodliffe.

 

 

 

Chapter One, 2052 Selves (A Biography)

Chapter Two, 2052 Selves (A Biography)

Chapter Three, 2052 Selves (A Biography)

Chapter Four, 2052 Selves (A Biography)