Charlie Prodger

Prodger’s ongoing preoccupation with perspective and the physicality of the camera as a sculptural device is expanded in SaF05. Film industry cameras, a smartphone, a camera-trap and a flying drone are each used for their inherent material properties. The drone’s whirring is taken up as a sonic motif that mutates throughout the soundtrack via a bagpipe, a cicada mating call, a saxophone, a battery alarm—syncopated equivalences between animal and human, instrument and machine. Prodger’s autobiographical voiceover traces a chronology of intimate gestures and interpersonal connections from pubescence to the present, inscribed with the wider political structures of sovereignty, land use and territory. SaF05 is a meditation on relations, however tangible, that expand and diffuse conceptions of intimacy, sexuality, and kinship.

Throughout LHB, Prodger recounts her fixation—which began during her Berwick residency—with the Pacific Crest Trail, a 6-month, 2,663 mile long hiking path stretching from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada that traverses some of the most uninhabited wilderness in the US. Simultaneously, she repurposes the Northumberland flag—which marks the turbulent and patriarchal history involving territory, borders and identity of England’s most sparsely populated region—as a rectilinear framing device for her footage. Prodger uses this formal template to tessellate a personal camera-phone archive she has accumulated of urinating in various rural landscapes—an intimate queer territoriality with the gender-delineated spaces within which bodies are either permitted or prohibited to piss. Fluctuating between the macro of geopolitical land use and the micro of the personal-political body, LHB continues Prodger’s ongoing exploration into the complex relationships between bodies, identity, technology and time.

In this new work Prodger focuses on female attachments—a process of identification that includes friends and shape-shifting deities amongst other figures of admiration. Prodger habitually names her hard drives after personally influential older figures she wants to have in her daily working orbit. At one point during BRIDGIT, her panning camera reveals the icon of a flash drive she has named after a set of recordings by musician Alice Coltrane under the moniker Turiya. Later, in quoting the virtual systems theorist and pioneer of transgender studies Sandy Stone, Prodger cites her different names (Sandy Stone, Allucquére Rosanne Stone, Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone) as extended embodiments and multiple subjectivities spanning time and space. One of the many myths surrounding Bridgit is of her birth—which is said to have taken place in a doorway, the threshold of inside and out—a transitional space that in Neolithic terms represented the moment of shift from nomadic existence to domesticated agriculture. The footage moves between the domestic interior of Prodger’s home in Glasgow to various locations in the Scottish Highlands where Prodger has worked, as well as transit between. Alongside the film’s voices, the diegetic soundtrack spans these locations with rural soundscapes and incidental background music indoors. BRIDGIT is shot entirely on Prodger’s i-Phone, which she uses as part of day-to-day life, accumulating an ongoing archive. This work utilises some of that archive of footage, just as past works such as Stonymollan Trail, 2015, have done. By utilising the device prosthetically, the technology becomes an extension of the nervous system whilst also providing an intimate connection to global social interaction and work—dissolving the threshold between daily life and the conventions of production. For Prodger, the iPhone presents a set of rigorous formal parameters not unlike her previous explorations in 16mm. Where 16mm film has a fixed length (eg 100ft rolls), the iPhone has data storage limitations that constrain her shots to roughly 4 minutes in length and under, just slightly longer than a roll of film. Through image and interweaving narratives, the video explores multiple registers of bodily time: the arc of Prodger’s own life; the period of a year she took to make the piece; the real time of industrial and civic transportation; the clockwork rhythm of the medical institution; the temporality of socio-political movements that bridge individual lives and generations, and the vast time of prehistory.

Many of the tapes have corrupted over time, with emulsion breaking away and gathering at the edge of the frame. The geometric patterns caused by this degradation hover between entropy and order, a cubic aesthetic analogous with Prodger’s earlier rectilinear installations. Similarly, the video’s use of the geometry of the 16:9 (wide-screen) and 4:3 (standard) aspect ratios, bring the spatial concerns of Prodger’s former multi-monitor works into the linear constraints of the single screen. Stoneymollan Trail considers screens both as objects in the world (monitors, windows, folding screens), layered internal rectangles within the video, and as framing devices through which culture and reality are shaped. Throughout Stoneymollan Trail, language is used to explore subjectivity and the sequencing of desire. As well as writing from a personal perspective, Prodger includes a passage from the memoir of science fiction writer Samuel Delaney and an extract of an essay by post-minimalist artist Nancy Holt, exploring the contingent limits between self and other via intimacy and labour. Subject position in Stoneymollan Trail is in flux, since Prodger has no recollection of shooting much of the old miniDV footage she is using here (despite its personal content). She comes to it as found footage in a sense, being half inside and half outside it. Prodger considers her iPhone camera almost as a prosthetic device, an extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to global time, social interaction and work, its footage unavoidably revealing the visible rhythm of the body breathing. In contrast, punctuating Stoneymollan Trail are eight static shots of windows overlaid with screen printed indents featuring the names of cross-streets in Glasgow, where the artist lives and works. Each of these ‘chapter headings’ documents spaces that Prodger has produced work in over the last few years. The windows are presented as meditative surfaces of projection, hovering between introspection and output. Although Stoneymollan Trail weaves many images and experiences which shift around in time and space, it is locally grounded in its social attachments and means of production. It draws upon feelings Prodger experienced during the actual editing of the video, relating to technology, labour, care, language and loss.