MADISON BYCROFT (AU, 1987)
Residency period: January-February and August 2023
At La Becque, I created a new work titled Waterlogue: Four on the floor, a science fiction moving image work that follows four human characters and a dog on their journey that mirrors a hydrological cycle. The work explores hydro-feminist ideas around representation, refusal, rhythm, mysticism, queer world-building and disco. Fluid dynamics are taken as central in content and form, with the characters personifying or invoking the movement and cycles of water, from the melting of a glacier, to the flow of a river, the falling of cascades, eddying, eroding, resting for a moment in a dam, lake or puddle before continuing, and eventually dissolving into the sea, before evaporation, clouding and condensation begin the cycle again. The cyclic nature of water, and our own watery makeup collapse time and space, the water we live with now, is the same water that dinosaurs lived with.
In Waterlogue, water was used as a way to mediate images, filming underwater through different opacities, letting buoyancy direct camera movements, freezing filters that slowly melt and reveal an image, or using sheets of ice themselves as lenses to film through.
The characters attune themselves to different water sources that hold, store, synthesize and transmit information. Alongside thinking of water as post-natural in this way, Waterlogue makes a relationship between the fragmented images mirrored in mosaiced disco balls, with the diffraction and dappled reflections broken in water dynamics. — Madison Bycroft
Madison Bycroft lives and works in Marseille. Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia and the MFA programme at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016). Working with video, sculpture and performance, Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, expression and refusal. The politics of illegibility and legibility are explored through language and material, asking how “sense” is framed by historical contexts, biases and structures of power.
Bycroft is interested in how we might re-imagine “reading” (in its expanded sense) and understanding, not as goal-oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and creates space: opaque, never arriving, ungrounded and floating. They explore a methodology of disorientation and a practice of pleasure that is not goal-oriented and instead fractured, wandering, abstracted and planktonic.
Waterlogue : Four on the floor is supported by Creative Australia.
Madison Bycroft, ‘Waterlogue: Four on the floor,’ stills