__tamsin kavanagh
narrative shorts
rufus and ronnie
5 min. video: 2018
Where is Ronnie? Is she alive or dead? Did Rufus kill her or even know her? Or did he perhaps latch onto an image of her from the ‘Missing’ Posters around town? This is all up for speculation, and as Nancy Willard once said “sometimes questions are more important than answers.”
Alejandro Jodorowski’s Santa Sangre was one of my influences in using face-paint. I use it as a device to connect the characters into another reality; this is them in their most private moment, whilst also counteracting the idea of wearing a mask in public. The mask is their true identity.
A long time ago I saw a film made by Marguerite Duras and was touched by the intimacy created in a scene in which a couple are dancing and talking to each other without moving their lips.
Shot in Chicago in 2017. I worked with Frank Zango to create to create the score.
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Will Will
12.37 min. video: 2017
Many of the horrors of today are masked behind branding or an identity that cannot in itself be pinned down – the enemy is faceless and has infiltrated into everyday life.
Will Will is a classic short story with a surprise ending, a' la Roald Dahl’s ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ or Edgar Keret’s ‘Nimrod Flipout.’
Will is a regular guy in many ways. He has a dream to write a novel, but hasn’t had any success, and along with the lack of financial support he is able to provide for his daughter, Will reaches a point of desperation - willing to take any job that comes his way.
The basis for the film is somewhat fantastical: unbeknownst to Will, he is working for the ‘devil’ and poisoning people who believe they are giving money to a charity.
Is it his fault that these people die?
The film was shot in Chicago in 2017. I worked with Frank Zango to create the score.
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for phoenix: the sun never settled
Video Installation: 2016
The work profiles a descent into madness through the loss of reality to the virtual. The setting for the installation is a meta-internal one. Entered through a hallway with embossed wallpaper hanging down from the ceiling, green carpet, branches and electrical wires protruding from the walls. The creeping in of nature suggests the passing of time, where the electrical wires and lights are used to signify a future where technology has enmeshed with nature; a 'back to the future' space.
The hallway opens out onto a 'living-room' that has become both overgrown with sticks and leaves as well as engulfed in artificial light. Metal structures and photography lights suggest that it could be a set of some kind, the red velvet curtains and large projected video point towards the cinematic, yet the large red sofa, pot plants and picture frames bring it back to a domestic one. Could this be one of the last places we existed before becoming wholly virtual and trapped inside screen?
The looped video exists inside the installation, the installation becoming a main feature in the video. The cycle follows the protagonist, represented through a disembodied female voice, who illustrates the film and what she can see. She describes the room of the installation that the viewer is in, and eventually finds herself inside the video trying to navigate her way back - or is it the other way around? The work questions both the allure of the screen over physical reality, whilst also drawing the viewer into the cyclical, maddening and addictive nature of what is ultimately a blue flashing light with moving images.
Aiming to bring about questions of place and time; virtual and real – through an uprooting of the act of spectating, allowing for a reassessment of the everyday, and the truth found in fictioning.
Dimensions of installed space: 5 Metres x 14 Metres.
Video: 13.03 Min. Loop. Shot in the UK; London and Wales in 2015-2016.
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12.52 Min. Video. 2015
murdering mind
Video: 2015
Murdering Mind is a poetic film that documents the breaking down of sanity, or into sanity and away from the madness of a ‘highly functioning’ city dweller. The commute, the stress, the productivity at work, the health regime and the social life culminating into a breaking point. Is this a real murder? Or a metaphorical one?
Traveling and commuting are not the same thing. Commuting underground has been likened to the pornography of travel. A Murdering Mind explores a moment of thought deep under London’s busy streets, where people go not for pleasure but to simply disappear and re-appear elsewhere as quickly as possible. During that time people often descend into the depths of their own psyche. Murdering Mind takes that a step further and it’s unclear whether the voice that recounts, sings, and mumbles throughout the film is deep in thought, or having flash backs whilst fleeing after a terrible crime.
Freud said of psychoanalysis that it could be compared to the work of an Archaeologist; patiently, and deliberately scraping away the layers to reveal hidden objects that present themselves as clues to the bigger picture of a forgotten time. Murdering Mind could be seen as a mash-up of memories that signify an event.
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