Artist Katharine Fry discusses casting her doll performers, constructions of the self, and finishing the script a few days before her film, When I’m with you, premiered.
by Ben Nicholson
Still from When I’m with you (2022). Image courtesy of the artist.
Across video and performance, Katharine Fry’s work has regularly explored the boundaries of the body and the body as a boundary. Across various pieces she has explored the condition she refers to as ‘House Arrest’ through her own body before 2021’s Her Glass Flower House saw her reckoning with illness and recovery through the body of a doll. Returning to the milieu of the doll’s house, her 2022 film When I’m with you explores the intertwined identities of four women – Margot, Marie, Marjorie and Mother Flower – through a series of spectacular and surreal stop-motion performances that weave together the bombastically theatrical with the psychologically introspective.
On behalf of ALT/KINO, Ben Nicholson sat down with Fry to discuss When I’m with you and the processes of both conceiving of and then realising the film.
ALT/KINO: Could you explain a bit about the initial idea and how When I’m with you came into being?
Katharine Fry: I'd already made one film in the doll's house last year. That was under a different set of circumstances - it was after I was ill and not wanting to work with my still sick-looking body - but I found that it opened up something. Then I'd just come back from being away and was in quarantine. In that same week, everything I'd applied for came back as a 'no.' Teaching work, a commission, funding - whatever it was, it was 'no', 'no,' 'no.' I was obviously quite upset and frustrated because I also had nothing to do and nowhere to go and the first thing that came to me was this 'I'm waiting' monologue that would eventually appear in the scene where the two Maries are reflected flicking around a room of mirrors. I stopped what I was doing and wrote that out fresh. Film director Margy Kinmonth told me about this children's book from the 1950s by a Canadian author called Dare Wright, The Lonely Doll, so I wrote this quite sorry-for-myself monologue under the title, The Lonely Doll.
A/K: And were you imagining it taking place in the doll's house again, at this point?
KF: At that moment, I think I thought the film would be zooming in and out, zooming between the doll in the doll's house and me in my house and I might reanimate my performing body. And then I started casting for a new doll - which means looking online at dolls to buy. I found Margot, that was the first doll. Presumably she's named Margo - I'm not sure that they say it - but presumably she's named Margo for Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life. I saw her and instantly she had that kind of pressed, Lynchian housewife feel about her, and I was just knew 'she's the one.'
At that point I started reading stuff to start the percolation process. I start reading material not to work from it, but to both confirm hunches I already had and also put me in this space where I'll be looking away and dreaming up my own scenes. It started with just writing quite small factual stuff that interested me as I went through, but in there already, ideas for scenes were coming up. It might have just been something quite simple, like the idea of reflective saws running up her body or the idea of ribbons as a way to find her edges. How does the body know its limits? Actually - crucially - Susie Orbach’s Bodies reframes [Donald] Winnicott's idea of the true and the false self. This is something he relates to a primary caregivers’ attunement, or mis-attunement, to an infant. For most of us, if we're lucky/normal, most of the time our caregiver is pretty much attuned to what we want, or need, as infants so there's not too big a mismatch and there's no catastrophe in the infant mind. If the caregiver is so mis-attuned that they really can't ever recognise a need or desire - or urgency - coming from the infant, then the infant almost warps themselves, as a survival strategy, to what they see or intuit or understand the caregiver wants them to want. So at least some need is met. That constructs a false self - you could kind of break it down almost to chronic people pleasing - but you're emptied out of agency and desires. You form this performative, false self that only works externally and nothing's happening internally. Then there's the idea of a sort of fragile true self that's essentially buried or under-formed. So that started this idea of rigid bodies and floppy bodies, true bodies and false bodies. Whether a body was rigid because it was the suit of the robo-housewife or if it was a strong body of agency. Then, is the floppy one malleable and moving through its own desires or malleable because it is being moulded externally? I hadn't quite resolved this, but I knew what was going to happen.
A/K: So, this begins the notion of these various iterations of the self?
KF: Well, ok, so the gold in The Guardian is the below the line comments. I read all the problem pages and I read all the comments. One man wrote in about his work colleague who told him that long ago she had created a second person called Marjorie, who was responsible for all her dark thoughts and actions. Marjorie is my maternal grandmother's name and so I thought 'let's have some Marjorie.' Etymologically, Margot and Marjorie are actually the same name, so I really liked this and was already beginning to feel like I was setting up a play with different aspects and how separate these characters really were.
Still from When I’m with you (2022). Image courtesy of the artist.
A/K: I wanted to ask you about meaning in your film and how you feel about being asked to explain - particularly to viewers - the meaning behind the various elements and the way you weave in your influences.
KF: I don't mind being asked. I really like hearing people's wild speculation and if it in any way touches on what I came from that's great. Some people ask quite specific questions and I sort of don't mind offering what things do for me, I don't mind telling my stories about it. However, I also don't want to suggest that my stories are in any way final to me, or that the story started before I had the image - you know, quite often I set things up and make images and make scenes and then think 'oh, yeah, I kind of think that's what's going on.' I don't stop myself by asking those questions or worrying about those questions. So yeah, I suppose I don't mind sharing some idea of what it means for me, but I also like the idea that people have space for their interpretation.
A/K: It's interesting. Sometimes it can feel as though audiences are really keen to be told some definitive meaning.
KF: If they're anxious, yeah, but then students will ask, 'what was your motivation? What was your intention?' My response is that I'm anti-motivation, I'm anti-intention. I'm against this idea that something is hammered into shape before you do it - because why on earth would you do it?
A/K: I suppose, given that, I wanted to ask you about “House Arrest” which I’ve seen framed both as a body of work and as a concept. Do you see there to be a discrete set of films that fall within it? Or is it more of an idea that's underpinning many facets of your work?
KF: I never think that you can pin a neat theoretical platform under any work, nor stick it neatly on top, to explain it - but people really like to. “House Arrest” is the name of my practice-based PhD and I struggled for a really long time to have any notion of what the hell I was really doing. So, I literally looked at my work, and saw that for 15 years a figure has been turning up in a house, doing stuff, and I hadn't resolved this. So, my question was 'why does this figure keep recurring in this house?' My answer: 'she's under house arrest' and that was just an instant answer. Then I went on a journey through psychoanalytic theory and the time-based work of other artists to flesh out this idea of a subject whose desire is compressed by the boundary of their skin - a skin onto which social normative expectations are projected. This desire to explode the body or search for wholeness is a very common thread - whether it's in romantic language of seeking out your other half, or the return to a big bang or a primordial something, or oneness and nirvana in various religions and spiritual practices. We have this idea that there's something that's going to complete me outside of me, and if I could just get out of me, I would be there. But then also there is an anxiety of 'if I explode, where do I go?' and that's why I talk about "House Arrest" as the condition of an ambivalent subject that can never resolve itself. So, there is a degree to which I can choose to read aspects - the meeting between a self and an “other”, the surface of a body – or nuances of "House Arrest" through every work. You could also make other stories about them, though. It's a useful tool but it's not the only tool.
A/K: When you came to the point of putting a certain label on it, or suggesting a framework for it to be read, do you feel that it changed the way you approached new work? Do you ever feel that you have to continue exploring it or that work needs to fit into it? I suppose that is maybe a broader question about commercial, institutional, or audience pressures - funding, commissions - and how you go about navigating that.
KF: That's a great question on lots of counts. No one has funded or commissioned any of my work, other than one performance series I made in 2008. So, although the Barbican said 'make it' they certainly didn't commission When I'm with you. The first outline for Her Glass Flower House was actually for a Film and Video Umbrella commission that I didn't get. When I was shooting Her Glass Flower House, I had written this synopsis and so I did look at it as a frame, but I said 'I'm not beholden to that. I don't even have a contract with myself that that's what I have to make - so don't worry about it.' I think that quite early on, the Barbican wanted some blurb about the film that I hadn't made. It was funny, they told me they were glad I didn't mention before the screening that I had still been writing the script a few days beforehand. I was like, 'I kind of did tell you - I said I had a month to do the sound and the sound technically is the script. I trust myself to get it done, but it would probably scare other people. I don't really feel under any constraints, though.
The new film that I'm going to be making based at The Museum of the Home kind of picks up stuff, I guess, but it's also just picking up things that I feel are urgent. I'm starting with what images are coming to mind. I remember describing one of these sequences with a mother and daughter and flowers being planted in a chair - it's like a whole world that unfolds between the two of them just with these objects. I described it to the collections manager and said that, at that moment, I didn't really know what it meant and was fine with that. I say that just to explain how things go. I will have a certainty about a sequence of images and if I have to worry about that, I'll worry about it months from now. Right now, I'm just saying that that's the sequence.
A/K: You spoke just then about the different stages of this work and obviously you had your ideas of scenes, then shot them all. So, you're then coming to the point where you edit it, and then you write it?
KF: Actually, I guess I essentially did make an after-the-fact storyboard for the first time. I had 50 pieces of paper that corresponded to what I shot, and I cleared a table and started laying them out in an order and started editing them in that order. I think there was only one scene that didn't make the cut - I thought it was the wrong side of cringy - but other than that, that was pretty much the visual edit. Some of it is stop-motion, some of it is live action - so it demands different ways of editing it. Any camerawork in it is post-production stuff; figuring out how I'm going to pan and move the frame. Then I got Ned Cartwright, the composer. I think I had about 40 minutes of the visual edit done, and I wanted him to start thinking about a score for the opening sequence with the windows. So, he would go away and work on that and then later we had some time in my studio, we had some time in a recording studio. Some bits of script I had already written - I'd written Marjorie's "luxury" sequence and I'd written the "I'm waiting" monologue. I was really nervous about bad writing, so I decided the only way to avoid bad writing was to not over-write it and to not over-wring it in multiple drafts. It felt like I had sort of steeped myself enough in my initial research and through my own world-making that I could say, 'there's just 30 seconds here; what's being said in these 30 seconds?' and then I wrote the words, recorded the words, put the words on. It was brutally quick.
Still from When I’m with you (2022). Image courtesy of the artist.
A/K: Is that your usual order even when you're not working with the dolls?
KF: Yeah, exactly. Generally, other than Creepers, what I'm doing when it's me and an object or me in an environment, I've started with a hunch - with an action and an object - often I get to the point where I think I'm going to shoot it and that action is actually physically impossible. So, then I'm like, 'okay, I've got these hours, I guess I'll do something.' So, I just do stuff until I'm able to look back on the footage and have a feeling about something, there's probably enough there that when I put this on a timeline, something good is going to happen. Then I set the visual edit. But yeah, writing words usually comes last.
A/K: You briefly mentioned your new film a minute ago and while it's a bit of a cliche final question, as you brought it up, I feel like it's permissible here to ask you about. What can you tell us about what you're currently working on and how it came about?
KF: I was awarded a DYCP [Developing Your Creative Practice] grant from the Arts Council and that gives me a starting budget. I've never worked with a crew before. I've never worked with a producer or a Director of Photography - I've never done any normal film stuff and I'd like to. In one way, it can satisfy the larger scale of ideas I'd like to try and also, I can try to understand what happens to me in that process. Everything I do in my work, I do fine. It's all fine, it all works and what comes out is pretty good, but I'm aware there are people with very specific skills and those honed skills are much better than mine. But is that better? Is that difference going to give me something? I don't know and I'd like to find out.
I've been talking to the Museum of the Home since my last exhibition with Danielle Arnaud Gallery. I'm going to be shooting in the two almshouses there that mirror each other as footprints. It will be live action, one set in the 1730s and one in the 1830s. I also have full permission to go through their entire collection and do what I want as long as the object can handle being handled. Because I've not worked with a crew in this way, I literally need someone to tell me this is how many people you will need on set, this is how much it costs per day to have them there, this is how many days we're going to shoot something. My own parameters for my work are just like 'when's the screening? It's got to be done by the screening.' This is going to be about mother-daughter intergenerational dynamics, playing across three generations. There will be a bit of period specificity but more like the ghosts of objects - some objects in the room will shift to suggest something's changed or a costume might change. It's called The Fur Chest. There will be a fur chest and the things that come out of the chest will act as catalysts for changes in the scene. The daughter is going to be bedridden, attached to a spinning wheel by her feet that her mother's going to control in one generation. Whether each daughter is truly ill, beset by a phantom illness, or subject to her mother’s control will be open to shifting interpretation. Their interactions, using objects from the museum’s collections, will focus on the daughter’s feet as a metaphor for developing or restricting autonomy. The daughters don’t speak, using doll’s house furniture to communicate their desires in stop-motion sequences. They manipulate wooden feet in the daytime to secretly dance at night.
Here I’m interested in family structures, in behaviours that repeat across generations, from epigenetic trauma to using your parents’ words. My characters are containers of memories and feelings that don’t belong to them. As each daughter becomes a mother, a dysfunctional dynamic is transmitted and transformed across generations, showing how a chain of containers is made. cross the generations, silent interactions between mother and daughter will be loaded with conflicting desires and unmet needs. Each struggle to find a voice, body or story that fits them, until the last daughter finds a separate identity from her mother’s.
I dreamt up the bones of The Fur Chest in the 20 minutes it took me to walk home from the Museum after my first visit to the collections store where I saw an incredible fur-coated trunk from the 1700s. Since then, I’ve been pulling all of the strange and the unusual out of the archives and playing them across my body and through the almshouses, imagining scenes as I go. I’m in heaven!
When I’m with you screens at The Museum of the Home on Thursday 20 followed by a discussion and then plays on a loop throughout Friday 21 April 2023.
Ben Nicholson is a writer and curator specialising in non-fiction, experimental film, and artists’ moving image. He is the founder and editor/curator of ALT/KINO.