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Before the Gale
Wellington 2019
Jess Richards
Before the Gale is a video installation, based on a short story written by Jess Richards in 2018. Within this fragmented short story, the narrator is remembering, and remembering, and remembering, and as the world ends, forgetting, and forgetting, and forgetting.
“On the news, one mental president threatens another mental president, and both of them are madmen who have access to nuclear missiles, but somehow everyone voted for them. The world would be a better place if certain people could just be disappeared.”
The video is of an altered book. The cut-up short story interacts with a collection of English poetry about ‘exotic/foreign’ landscapes. The book shown in this video is one of a set of eleven altered books, which contain new narratives from combinations of texts which include cut-outs, redaction, and pasted-in phrases.
Jess Richards’s academic background is in Visual Performance (performance / installation / performance writing), Dartington, UK, 1994. She is the author of three literary fiction novels, Snake Ropes (2012) Cooking with Bones (2014) and City of Circles (2017) which are published by Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton, UK. In recent years, she has collaborated with the artist Sally J Morgan (as Morgan + Richards) in live art / installation / writing performances. She is currently studying towards a practice-based PhD which explores the use of artistic processes within creative writing practice at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, NZ.
With thanks to Jane Wilcox and Michael Bridgeman of Massey University for their expert assistance in lighting, audio and video editing support. Thanks to Kingsley Baird, for nudging me beyond the page. Many thanks also to Sally J Morgan for prompting my idea of whispers.
