Date: 2022 Artist: Wanda Gillespie Filmmaker: Natasha Cantwell Hands: Sean Molloy and Wanda Gillespie
The absurdity of calculating impossible problems is exercised through a series of collaborative films by sculptor Wanda Gillespie and filmmaker Natasha Cantwell. A curious interaction of hand movements show Gillespie’s sculptured abacus in use. As the two players take turns, we search for a mathematical system, an order from the seemingly random chaos of movement and bead numbering. Is this a secret form of communication? A type of Morse code? Or could this be a most exquisite love letter to the world told through a complex mathematical equation?
Shot during a period of lockdown, when an elasticity is created around time and the counting of hours and days start to lose meaning, these films suggest a meditative playfulness to the ordering of things. At a time when we teeter on the precipice of huge shifts in our collective experience, fuelled by the fragility of economic structures and our environmental crisis, Gillespie and Cantwell offer us a chess match as a puppet show, and ask if our desire to find meaning in disorder is simply a symptom of humanity unmoored from ‘normal’ life?