Taking My Skin, 2006

2006, 16mm, b&w, sound, 35min

I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Sometimes the artist is behind the camera, sometimes the mother, sometimes both simultaneously behind and in front, or neither. Both perform, film, and alternately instruct, position and direct the other. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.

Directed and produced: Sarah Pucill
Funded        Arts & Humanities Research Council and Arts Council of England
Camera, performance:    Sarah Pucill, Jane Pucill
Camera, lighting supervision:  Megan Fraser
Sound technician:                     Megan Fraser
Editing & sound:                       Mairead MacClean
2006
Greenwich Picture House
Cork Film Festival
2007
The Millennium Film Workshop, New York (retrospective)
Greenwich Picture House (retrospective)
Images Festival of Film & Video, Toronto – Marion McMahon Award
European Media Art Festival Osnabruck, Germany
Intervention, Fieldgate Gallery, London (staged exhibition)
Light Cone 25th Anniversary, Paris
2008
Mother Cuts: Experiments in Film, Video and Photography, New Jersey City University Galleries (staged exhibition)
Ann Arbor Film Festival
Multichannel, Artsway, UK (installed exhibition)
The Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (retrospective)
2010
The Freud Museum, London
2010
The ‘Other’, Rencentre de Sophie, Nantes, France
2011
Moving Image South, Curzon Cinema, Wimbledon, London
Retrospective Screening curated by Laura Kloss
2012
Madrid Experimental Film Festival, Retrospective

2007 Marion McMahon Award, Images Festival, Toronto, Canada
2007  Directors Citation, Black Maria Film Festival, New Jersey, US