Hireath, 2020

Writing by Sera Waters

Exhibition Essay for FELTspace, Hiraeth

To stand before Georgia Button’s digital video installation Hiraeth is to teeter upon the edge of within, sensorially adrift in between. Encompassed by the sound of rustling dry grasses, sticky weeds, and wavering crops, her dual videos are looped into perpetually moving cycles of seeking, never staying still. This inability to settle is reinforced again and again, technically, conceptually, and bodily, to grasp at the outer limits of human expression little touched, and only brushed up against, by written or verbal language.[1] “Hiraeth”, a Welsh term with no English equivalent, approximates a sensation not unlike homesickness and quite like a loss of connection to places, real or imagined, where one’s spirit or self once belonged but now cannot reach … at least not in the same way. This is a pre-verbal longing, felt before it is known, and a sense shared by many across this planet. We can imagine states of hiraeth differ remarkedly dependent upon entangled ancestral, biological and homely roots, and with each individual negotiation of belonging, or not, while we all grapple with ways the world keeps changing. For Button it is the inability to wholly conjure or contain the wrenching feelings of hiraeth with mere words that makes it achingly and bodily familiar - and makes the sensation-creating medium of video apt for this grappling.

Through her attentive technical touches Button uses the camera as a body to perceive video approximations to the always seeking never resting sensations of hiraeth. She embraces what philosopher and film scholar Laura U. Marks refers to as the ‘haptic potential’ of video for creating ‘haptic speculation’[2], and amalgamates filmic jolts, small lurches, and blurred fields of vision, with an acknowledgement that the video consistently approximates touch but ultimately falls short. These haptic moments of potential married with the untouchability of video, together transform into a speculative space of awareness where being in betweenness registers. This is made all the stronger by Button’s intentional excising of bodily experiences often anticipated from film and used to luring effect by video art forerunners such as Pipilotti Rist; of smoothness, flow, escapism and immersion to the point of losing oneself. Instead we are consciously present with Button’s footage, shot at almost double the regular frame rate, as she staggers and jostles through dry growth, weaving at knee-height above the ground. Softly brittle stems come momentarily, ever so briefly into clarity, but never in sustained focus, rather as indicators of ongoing movement. The shallow depth of field too, puts the soil, tufts and encountered dark shapes, out of perception, out of grasp, and into unreachable terrain. The inability to see deeply or peripherally and being between fields of focus is a bodily reminder of how it feels to be always wanting, but never able, to settle.  

In all, Button’s is an unwavering exploration into longing through technical restrictiveness and conceptual betweenness, with the exception of one moment; a short gasp panning upward from weed to horizon line and blue sky. This brief shift in perspective, a look up from scanning terrain of this time, brings a realisation that the indefinable idea of ‘home’ and our entanglements with it is as limitless, and as ungraspable, as the sky. Contemporarily, amidst the swirl of past, present and historical struggles, we often find our selves, our bodies, poised or paused between inexpressible states, longing for homely fulfilment once known or imagined. Artists have long known words fail to convey what is felt sensorially through the body; what makes itself known long before processes of comprehending and contending kick in. The pull of Hiraeth, enabled by the haptic qualities of Button’s videos and the jostling between close scanning and momentary out-of-focus vastness, is the widening awareness of being between and finding a place for where speculating on reckoning otherwise out of reach can find its home.

[1] To borrow a turn of phrase from Laura U. Marks, touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2002): ix.  

[2] ibid: 10. 

Sera Waters is an artist and writer living on Kaurna Country, South Australia. Her writing, embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures examine settler colonial homemaking patterns, and matters of materiality. Waters exhibits across Australia and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.