By the time she went to the Slade (1980-2) for her
postgraduate degree she had, in these early films, begun to explore some
unique aspects of the film medium, such as its framing of the subject in
space and its potential for the shaping of time. The film she completed
at the Slade, I Dish (1982), retained and expanded this direct and
photogenic style, in which ordinary actions are also enigmas. The sparse
events in the film - such as cooking and eating a fish - are shown 'out
of sequence'. The two protagonists are divided in film space but linked
by editing, so that the viewer connects them imaginatively even though
they never appear together in the same shot. Finally, a naked young
woman in a rock pool sifts stones and hooks, at the very edge of the
frame that contains her.
The images in the films were both literal and metaphoric, depicting
exact events but also creating physical and personal associations for
the viewer. Ideas are evoked in images rather than words (as the puns in
the film titles may suggest, in their play with the ambiguity of
language). This was to characterise much of her later work, although she
also made a long 'talkie' video with her mother called Almost Out
(1984), whose title and theme suggest birth and beginnings. Here, the
naked mother is filmed and questioned by the daughter in a TV studio,
surrounded by monitors, while the daughter is similarly filmed and
questioned by an unseen cameraman (her former tutor and mentor at
Canterbury, Pierre Attala Lapierre). The search for identity borders on
transgression in this striking video, whose documentary rawness is
equally shown as mediated within a formal structure that reveals its own
artifice.
