Lisa Harms
Lisa Harms is an Adelaide-based video artist and writer who utilises a range of media in installations which are often site specific or site responsive. Recent works have explored the possibilities of installation as an immersive, theatrical forum for evoking and triggering a range of heightened emotional states.
roadmovie: Holly and Bob contemplate the perimeter of the (once) inland sea
This piece is a digitally constructed scene depicting a cropped view of my sixteen year old son Tom, facing the camera and attempting to steady a fish bowl containing two fish (Holly and Bob) which he holds close to his chest while a desert landscape apparently hurtles around them.
The roadmovie is one of many shot on a trip my husband and I took with Tom through the arid regions of outback South Australia: in clichéd truth, the driest state of the driest continent. I was fascinated and disturbed on this trip by the visible geographical indicators of the vast ancient seabed that occupied much of Australia’s interior and by the all too rare spectacle we were treated to throughout the trip of rolling, voluminous clouds. The fragility and contingency of this ‘portable world’ containing the fish has a certain pathos set against the not-so-portable, but similarly fragile, similarly contingent environment superimposed as passing disconnected vista.
Power Games
This is a three-screen installation that revels with (slightly guilty) abandon, in a series of illusory power plays. A mobile phone may be used to participate vicariously in an apparently inconsequential and artificially constructed disturbance.
Instructions for play: Download the file dryer.3gp from the Bluetooth billboard and play with the volume set to high. Holding your phone to the right of the turbulent fish bowl to experience a giddy yet entirely unreasonable sensation of power.
constellation (pocket version)
This is an (almost) unedited loop of some footage I took while travelling by plane from the Gold Coast to Adelaide recently. The first section shows the view from my windowseat in real time as taped, but soundlessly, in black & white, so that the dams, rivers and streams far below appear as their own celestial mirror: fields of stars blinking, flashing and dissipating in passage. The second section plays completely unedited as shot, accompanied by the incidental noises of engine and cabin. The sun catches and reflects light playing jewel-like off each discrete catchment as the plane flies overhead…a vision that took my breath away as it quietly unfolded through space and time.