Output details

Buried, 2009, Video Installation, Colour, Sound, Duration 8:00 min, 35mm film transferred to High-Definition video.

Buried was commissioned and produced by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, with the support of an Esme Fairbairn grant of £15,000, as part of a major one-person exhibition of video and photographic works in 2009. The work was conceived and produced to accompany Ghost Story, 2007, which was the starting point for the exhibition. The research continues the investigation initiated in Ghost Story into how film/video can be used to explore the connections between forgotten or repressed memory and landscape. ‘Buried’ explores connections between the spoken narrative of Ghost Story and the conventions of visualizing the spectral in the film genres of horror and suspense. The use of a dense forest as the location for the work evokes the landscape of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and its place in collective memory as articulated in Simon Schama’s investigation of the European forest in Landscape and Memory (1994). The research tests the relationship between place, memory and sound as Doherty experiments with a transition between the naturalistic sound of the edge of the forest and the unsettling soundtrack, that makes use of archival audio material, which accompanies the imagery of its interior. The absence of a visible or heard ‘character’ that might encourage subjective identification leaves the viewer/listener open to the affective possibility of the experimental interplay between image and sound. Buried has subsequently been exhibited nationally and internationally in the following one-person exhibitions; Passages, Prefix Photo, Toronto, September 2009, Buried, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, December 2009, Lack, Alexander and Bonin, New York, May 2010, as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival, Kilkenny, August 2010, Disturbance, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin, September 2011, Traces, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, October, 2011, Buried, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, November 2011 and UNSEEN, City Factory Gallery, Derry, September 2013.