and one guest, 2024
Sculptural video installation & spatial intervention - MiniDV/digital video, colour/sound, English with English subtitles, loop of 25’11” (on 65” monitor screen, stereo speakers), paint, paint buckets.
Installation view: as part of Narrative Cloggers (FKDS duo exhibition with Anna Clawson), Kunstnernes Hus (Loftet), Oslo, NO.
- What do sausages, women & the Moon landing have in common? "and one guest" sends you down ten successive rabbit holes, all dug out from one model train club in Norway.
"In the work for Narrative Cloggers, and one guest (2024), Ward has made a video of her time spent with a group of Norwegian model train enthusiasts. One section, titled Details, begins with a cacophony of Norwegian men saying the word ‘details’, the word popping up in slight variations of the same sentence, that amounts to a lament that other people (women, children) don’t notice the details of all their hard work. This section ends with a throw-away comment by one of the men: “Perhaps if you look close enough”."
"Zooming in on her model-train men, Ward gets lost in so many side-quests, as we can see from the onslaught of chapter titles: Sausages, Women, Moon landing, etc. Details, details, details. To get lost in the details can work as a kind of coping mechanism when overwhelmed by it ALL, that thick accumulation of history again."
"Ward fills the bench to view her work with packets of boiled sausages, and we find the wall behind the monitor screen to be painted like a background designed by one of the model train enthusiasts: the mini-replica blown up to a human scale, if not a real scale (trees reaching up to about waist-height)."
^ Above quotes taken from Belladonna Paloma's commissioned text for Narrative Cloggers
^ Video still
^ Gallery wall behind monitor is painted like a background designed by one of the model train enthusiasts, only blown up in scale.
^ Video still
^ Door into gallery’s behind-the scenes loft space is kept ajar to mirror the actual setting of the model train club, itself located in a loft space at the top of an (ex-industrial) building.
^ Video still
^ Video still
Special thanks to:
Oliver Sutherland (post-production)
Seat, 2024
Sausages, wood, foam mattress offcut (studio bed), 2.00m x 0.54m x 0.70m
- Bespoke seating designed with your comfort & sausages in mind.
BT36 7WH's nose, 2024
Ink on wall, 28cm x 16cm
- Influenced by the backdrop to my childhood - the most famous feature of a rocky hill in the north of Ireland, whose imposing profile is visible throughout my neighbourhood (& accessible on foot from my back garden). This profile inspired Jonathan Swift to write his classic social satire from 1727, Gulliver's Travels, a story involving scale & the miniature.
^ Installation view of Narrative Cloggers (FKDS duo show with Anna Clawson), Kunstnernes Hus (Loftet), Oslo, NO
Photos: Istvan Virag/Kunstdok