On Video

Look at me now (2015)

Installation and video

WOMB

woom, noun: empty space

abyss, cavity, chasm, emptiness, gap, gulf, hiatus, hole, hollow, hollowness, interstice, interval, lacuna, nihility, nothingness, nullity, omission , opening, preterition, pretermission, 

skip, tabula rasa, vacancy, vacuity, vacuum, void, womb

Ute Kirkwood’s work has often turned a mirror upon herself and her surroundings, but her recent personal experiences of becoming a mother have spawned a new level of interrogation. Look at me nowthe work rhetorically and somewhat bewilderingly asks. Playing with different registers of language, Kirkwood describes the journey from pregnancy to the experiences of motherhood through a variety of allegorical and representational props, documentary drawings and photographs.

written by Matthew Hearne

We Put Out One Fire (2014)

Single screen video projection and blackboards

We are riding into the country

we are having a golden rope in our hand

Two women made it

they have spun it over night

Out of the umbilical cord delicate and little

they have spun the rope so golden and fine!

The third women, she wants to cut it -

therefore we have to ride, always and forever ride …

Otherwise the toads and snakes will come

and capture our little boy.

(children's song from Slovakia, translated from German)

'99 thousand' (2014)

3 Monitor Video Installation

In this piece Kirkwood is inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story, A Thousand Dreams of Stellavista (1962) which sets in a world where houses have semi-autonomous personalities, being able to sense, change and remember, depending on the character their inhabitants. Like Ballard’s story 99 thousand, is about the interplay of domestic space and social relations but with the artist’s own interpretation. The piece questions the norms of family hierarchy- of father, mother and children, how they are expected to behave as individuals and as a unit. It makes you think about where we belong in the web of social relations and how certain spaces can influence the way act. It raises questions like, Do we have certain ‘roles’ that are expected of us and Why? Do we want to conform or resist and reconfigure these expectations?  (written by Noll Saksit Khunkitti)