Chelsea graduate’s work explores human consciousness and living with dementia
- Written byEleanor Harvey
- Published date 13 April 2022
Throughout Spring 2022 The Bluecoat, Liverpool is presenting the largest overview to date of artist and filmmaker Suki Chan’s multi-platform project CONSCIOUS.
The MA Fine Art graduate from Chelsea, UAL uses moving image, photography and sound to explore our perception of reality.
Her films take audiences on a journey and shine a light on subjects that are under-represented across the human condition: from sight loss to identity and belonging. Suki’s wider study of consciousness includes collaborations with people living with dementia. She explores how memory loss can destabilise our understanding of the present, as well as open-up other possible realities.
CONSCIOUS
The exhibition brings together the diverse, subjective perspectives of scientists and ordinary people, whose multi-layered stories change our preconceptions about individual and collective consciousness.
The exhibition includes photography, sculpture, virtual reality as well as three films Memory (2019); Hallucinations (2020); and Fog In My Head (2021).
Fog In My Head, the most recent film in the CONSCIOUS series, was a commission by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN). It contrasts real-world imagery with abstract scientific material. The viewer is taken on a visual and aural journey from the centre of a natural beehive, a developing brain, a home, an office and a forest.
The title refers to the quote “fog descending on the brain” Wendy Mitchell’s metaphor for how the neurocognitive disorder dementia makes her feel. Fog is an analogy for the confusion, disorientation and isolation that dementia brings.
CONSCIOUS is being exhibited simultaneously across 2 galleries:
Short film of the making of Suki Chan: Conscious
Making of Suki Chan: CONSCIOUS