Aideen barry’s possession (2011)

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Abstract

Tracy Fahey Aideen Barry’s Possession (2011) Figure 18. Aiden Barry, Possession, 2011. Video still. Reproduced with kind permission of the artist Aideen Barry. A woman’s head lies half-buried in an avalanche of cakes, face smeared in icing. From the debris, one eye looks about, signalling a moment of lucidity; a sense that the protagonist is aware of the strange spectacle she presents. This is a still from Possession (2011), Irish artist Aideen Barry’s live stop-motion animation film about greed, anxiety, confinement, and excess. In this single shot Barry appears as both protagonist and filmmaker. As she says herself: Possession is all about control, a weird control where I’m operating in front of the camera and behind the camera at the same time. In this shot I was manipulating the cakes on the table and checking that the camera was still in focus in the mirror angled to reflect it - I’m both subsumed and in control. (Fahey 2017) This one image signals the marvellous duality of Barry’s Gothic vision of suburban domesticity. It is made by a woman experiencing the confines of the Irish home who is also a female artist forging an angry, potent expose of the existence of this suburban domestic dystopia in contemporary culture. As a piece it offers a link to the tradition of Female Domestic Gothic, analysed by both Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and Ellis’s The….

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Gothic
Subtitle of host publicationA Reader
PublisherPeter Lang AG
Pages111-118
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781787072701
ISBN (Print)9781787072688
Publication statusPublished - 26 Apr 2018

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