A Body Within a Body Within a Body3-channel video installation with scent (pine, cypress, eucalyptus), 7:41:19
Scored by Kierscey Rand and voice narration by Dr. Michelle Wilson
2022
* full viewing of videos available upon request.
Developed during my doctoral research, A Body Within a Body Within a Body is a three-channel video installation with scent that approaches the notion of animality through transformation, scale, and sensorial proximity. The work immerses viewers in subtle aromas of pine, cypress, and eucalyptus; an inhaled, embodied encounter that frames animality as porous and ongoing. Two channels feature stop-motion footage of wax skull sculptures (human and bear) slowly melting and transforming, revealing embedded found objects as forms slip between human and nonhuman resemblance and fade in and out like ghostly reminders of shared impermanence. The third channel intercuts fragmented footage of travel through a sandpit observed by a drone, gradually pulling back until the body becomes a small dot—an image of humbling scale and decentered humanness. Filmed across rural Northern Ontario (my hometown) and other sites of inquiry, the installation assembles fragments of selfhood and multispecies relation to suggest that we live as “bodies within bodies,” entangled in the shared materiality of the living and the dead.
This project is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program (OGS).
