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2020; Domestic Landscape comission





  
























 
Horse Hospital, London Nov 2019






Janula’s recent video work - Mutables is a layered exploration of moving image which maps the soul-search of a half-woman, half-fish creature - a mermaid in reverse with a fish’s head and a human body. Partly inspired by research into mythical water based female creatures from the Odyssey - ‘Between Aeaea and the rocks of Scylla’ as well as ideas around otherness and inter-connectivity.

By merging dualism’s– the digital and analogue, artificial and natural, Mutables floats between several different worlds. We drift from a beach to a semi-urban wilderness, domestic scenes, and hybrid computer/3D scanned object nether-places – following our heroine on her quest to seek her place in this comic cyber-topian drama. The soundtrack further helps us to navigate between scenes like a schizoid music video – ambiance gives way to triumphant synth pop, through to glitch and spacey groove; punctuated in moments by the artists own voice reading from clandestine passages, and a chopped-up disembodied voice which seems to be questioning our safety and/or sanity.

The work doesn’t seek to judge the viewer’s relationship with the natural world or project any ecology-based agendas. There is no guilt or shame, just existence. The character has been designed to be highly relatable – we share in her frustrations. We too, may wish to seek harmony within our environment/s, but find ourselves overwhelmed by the growing complexities of modern living. We also may gesture aggressively while babbling and tapping away on our inanimate machines, seeking meaning through a screen while forgetting our roots to the earth and sea.

In Mutables, Janula’s wobbly heroine could be any one of us – and our desperate attempt at ‘Tree Pose’ to restore balance to the lives we suddenly finds ourselves lea



















   

























From The Author of the Acacia Seeds
and Other Extracts

           
And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer — the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the  still less   communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in   the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.