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Member Profile
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | November – December 2021
Ann Maria Healy, ‘Hypnagogia’, installation view, 2021; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and The LAB Gallery.
Aifric Kyne: What is the importance of video in your practice?
Hypnagogia AIFRIC KYNE INTERVIEWS ANN MARIA HEALY ABOUT HER RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE LAB.
Ann Maria Healy: For me, video and moving image act as spaces where other works might spring out from (or get resolved within). The moving image feels like a sculpture to me, so it’s important that it has a presence as part of my wider installations. I often think about how the audience will feel in the space where the videos are played. For example, the beanbags for My Dreams Won’t Resist are gaming beanbags. They have a back to them because I wanted them to cup the sitter. While the peacock is a central motif in ‘Hypnagogia’, I’ve used it before, so it is part of this iteration of work but also operates separately. In this show, I think of the peacock as playing the role of a dream. AK: How do you make the separate elements of an exhibition interact with each other? AMH: This is something I try to intentionally make happen but resist at the same time. Sometimes I feel the works collapse into each other and other times they’re way too different. For ‘Hypnagogia’, everything is channelled through the eye sculptures. I knew that I wanted them to feature in the video work I was making and used photogrammetry to make this happen. I worked with a gaming company called Enter Yes to make that video. Sometimes I feel like some of my artworks eat other works, or they show up in each other. I think specifically about the architecture; for this exhibition, I kind of infected the space with sculptural works coming out of the environment. For example, the skullcaps upstairs are coming down from a cavity in the ceiling and the windows are tinted. I think a lot about story and narrative and I wanted the space to have a residue of the video. The sculptures have lo-fi motion tracking markers, which gives them an opacity. There’s something kind of mystical about them.
