Kate Woods

Water Feature (2016)

2 min 27 secSingle channel / Digital Video / Colour / Sound

Water Feature shows four New Zealand landscapes into which the artist has digitally "installed" Nam June Paik’s famous work TV Garden (1974).

Woods is interested in the documentation and depiction of landscapes, which, in her practice, are often found images. Many of her works digitally manipulate, animate, overlay, or re-colour static scenes of mountains, lakes, gardens, and forests. In Water Feature, the TV screens display small landscapes set within the larger scene and, in other works, Woods often punctures her images with other places, so that there are many sites jostling for space inside the one frame.

In Water Feature, the first landscape is a painted forest scene (Woods writes that this painting was huge, a mass-produced image she found), and the square TVs of Paik's work are also painted, and scattered throughout the video's frame. Waterfalls appear and pour into the TV screens, before night descends and the screens glow dimly. The work oscillates between night and day, each day dawning onto a new landscape. Rain falls down on the TVs, and a frenetic series of landscapes flicker across their screens. The final shot shows a suburban housing development with the screens in the front garden, amongst the roses.

Water Feature partly stemmed from an interest Woods had in a local survey through which people recommended that water features be added to art gallery entrances—an interesting conflation of "nature" in a built environment.

Other works by Kate Woods

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