Catriona Gallagher

Perdikaki

Catriona Gallagher

Maroula Antoniadou, John Bicknell

Three characters search for meaning in the growth of an overlooked urban weed. The Narrator pursues the plant to find the elderly woman first seen picking it, yet as observations accumulate a shadow researcher emerges. Their methods entangle and the focus blurs. Is the Kyria’s knowledge being sought, or the Collector’s? And, other than the symbolic plant, do the other figures exist at all?

Video Villanelle (for distance)

Catriona Gallagher

Gallagher weaves together an assemblage of films, creating a narrative through repetition. Documenting her experience caught between Athens and her new home in Northumberland, via a period of ‘uncertain waiting’ in the South East of England. Gallagher explores her sense of dislocation by organising footage from her phone into a visual villanelle, a poetic form with a strict rhyming structure and repeating lines. Footage shifts between presence and absence, movement and stasis. Between the sodium glow of the Athens street lights and the iconic bridges of the Tyne punctuated by sunsets and deluges of rain. Gallagher often draws attention to the overlooked, the ‘hidden in plain view’ aspects of life, questioning what we bear witness to and what we choose to ignore. Within the transitional period between lockdown and the easing of restrictions, Gallagher subtly explores emotional connections to home and place, considering what is outside and what we carry within.