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 language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | The Gothic |
Subtitle of host publication | A Reader |
Publisher | Peter Lang AG |
Pages | 111-118 |
Number of pages | 8 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781787072701 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781787072688 |
Publication status | Published - 26 Apr 2018 |