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It' explores the human fascination with bodily secretions, and repulsive yet alluring textures and sounds through a series of close up frames of washing, grooming and caressing from which the viewer is unable to escape from. These everyday activities and rituals such as washing hair, removing gunk from the eye and under fingernails are elevated to monumental significance. Written, filmed and edited by Leonie McQuillan Since it's creation, It has gone on to tour in The White Pube's Zayn Malik Zindabad film screening, which has shown at the ICA London as well as other locations around the UK.
'It' explores the human fascination with bodily secretions, and repulsive yet alluring textures and sounds through a series of close up frames of washing, grooming and caressing from which the viewer is unable to escape from. These everyday activities and rituals such as washing hair, removing gunk from the eye and under fingernails are elevated to monumental significance. The close up scenes and the voice over which lists synonyms for the way liquid travels and describes the viscosity of materials adds a sensual, erotic element to the piece. 'It' exits between the boundaries of attraction and repulsion, dirty and clean and right and wrong as it appeals to our human desire to alter ourselves and revel in our own carnality. This in-between state extends to the ambiguity around gender that centres around the portrayal of hair and the ambiguity of male/female with the inclusion of both long silky hair and short stubbly bristles which evoke both facial and pubic hair.
Despite the repulsive nature of the viscous materials and squelching sounds, these elements are sanitized through digitization and the repulsive becomes beautiful. The video is a celebration of materiality and sensuality as the viewer is engulfed in a slimy, sticky fleshy environment that is as compelling and pleasing as it is disturbing.
Synopsis by Emily Sotudeh
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Through viscosity I challenge binaries which Roland Barthes describes as creating ‘structure and…meaning in Western thought and discourse’. Ones of fluid/liquid, male/female, dirty/clean, attractive/repulsive, right/wrong. Hair is also a loaded material to me, challenging and breaking down the same boundaries. I tend to my hair, making these dead cells growing out of my head look healthy and shiny, but to find hair in food or in the drain is repulsive and horrifying. Finding hair out of context instantly creates alarm and disgust because it breaks our rules and order and becomes dirty and abject, ‘dirt is essentially disorder’ (Mary Douglas). Through this, hair along with slime, break down binaries of living/dead, clean/dirty, attractive/repulsive and male/female.
I agitate and subvert gendered assumptions and stereotypes associated with slime and hair through interaction and narration, turning these on their head and questioning them. Developed from a piece of writing in which Jean-Paul Sartre speaks of the ‘feminine sucking’ of slime, equating slimes’ passivity to being female, I have become interested in subverting and questioning these associations through narration and gesture. Hair is also an extremely gendered material; your gender dictates how you style
it, where you have it and even how it’s removed. Again I aim to agitate these by operating in an inbetween state, this also allows room for the viewer to form and question their own attitudes towards these issues. I use narration to enhance the uncertainty of gender and subject, creating a sense of dislocation through vague and disparate narrative and imagery. I use ambiguity to beautify these substances and create an uncertainty to their origin and context.
Slime evokes an instinctual reaction of disgust; it’s viscosity like that of vomit, cum, spit and mucus. I attempt to evoke this repulsion and our subconscious fascination with bodily fluids through my work, sanitizing them for the viewer’s consumption through digitalization and the screen. I am also interested in creating tactility through the screen; evoking this haptic sense with a macro exploration of materiality through the flat medium of the digital age. I entice and seduce the audience through the language of advertising; erotically charged glossy imagery eliciting desire and lust like the adverts we are constantly bombarded with.
Words by Leonie McQuillan