Re-Emergence - Sarah Rhys

Re-Emergence by Sarah Rhys deals with the notion of revisiting a place where you have memories.

The project features a property that used to be her home when she was younger and has since become a National Trust property. When visiting the house, Sarah noticed that a glass-ceilinged room in the cellar of the building had become a semi-derelict courtyard. The room used to feature bright paintings of women on the walls, which were believed to have been painted by US or Canadian members of the armed forces when the property was a military hospital during WWII. The roof fell in during a fire in the 80s, and the paintings were eroded by exposure to the elements.

Sarah says that "When I realised that the semi derelict room was the one that had housed the murals, it was a stark confrontation with my inner sense of the place as well as my memory...  As a child I used to go down the stairs into this semi abandoned room, surrounded by these large female images, down into a place away from the everyday". 

Sarah photographed the walls and "read their archaeological layers and examining the traces of time, erasure and the elements" before moving on to the next part of her project. Using memory and archival images, she created two moving images to be projected onto the walls of the courtyard at night. The projections ran from floor to ceiling at would play at the same time. 

"The projection moves between the past and the present, with these figures slowly emerging from and then disappearing back into the walls only to re-emerge again in a cycle of eternal recurrence of being and non being."

I think this is a very creative project that echos the former glory of the house before it became derelict, therefore restoring memories and nostalgia for Sarah. The idea of revisiting locations where I hold memories has featured in my film, specifically with the day out to Clevedon. That is different to what Sarah has done, as she made an attempt to show that area of the house the way she remembered it, while the current state of the house shone through, whereas my revisiting of Clevedon served to get footage and audio for my film and to help develop the narrative of my film.