Laura Fitzgerald

The autobiographical and the fictional are enmeshed in my practice, and lie intractable within a shifting combination of media and formats. I often use models and projections to generate representational spaces, and with this, text that may be recognisable as an art writing form, becomes another metafictional space – that of the art world. Most recently, video has come to the fore, since nuanced differences between the documentary veracity and archival montage can be extremely ambiguous, generating even more possibility for mistaking the ‘real’. What is more my approach, via the video essay, enables me to consider the act of making art itself as a romanticised narrative and experience-based reality. I play this out in both in relation to mental and physical spaces by way of narration and locations, both manufactured, fantasised and found.

Currently I am working on a video project that narrates a kind of fictional technology that recompartmentalises perceptions of location and travel. Taking global phenomena – such as Facebook, Google, HD camera and televisions – and applying them to an incontrovertibly domestic scenario, I will be excavating a familiar landscape, and essentially defamiliarising it. The effect will be similar to that of the films of Chris Marker, whose account of a place seems to both describe it and unfold it. Discordant fragments, I feel, could be effective when placed along a coherent thread of some sort. This might be a travelogue, for instance, or a historicising archive, and along this, found and filmed footage can weave and unravel.