Ghost Grey

Ghost Grey Inspired by domestic paint charts and the Contemporary Colour Guide, How controlled colour contributes to modern living (1947), Ghost Grey, pays homage to the colour consultancy work of Elizabeth Burris-Meyer. Her books of the 1930’s – 1940’s, are now rare. In the surviving examples, closed tight for decades, painted colour samples pressed against opposite pages of her often lyrical text have left ghostly imprints. This ghosting nods to the history of gendered design process, and hierarchical systems of value. Using an electric drill, 3 mm wooden ply sample boards & artists quality oil paint, Ghost Grey records the process of the transformation of these material components against the backdrop of domestic interiors as sites of gender inequality. Thus, domestic visual histories usually kept distinctly apart by gendered boundaries and hierarches, are re-articulated through a material ghost story. In literary history one reading of the ghost story is as a sophisticated tool of gender expression, especially in the context of the haunted house. The haunted house becomes the site of gender expression, an articulation of the unspeakable. Ghost Grey grasps this history of literary fiction and makes it material. The material tools of the painted domestic interior and the history of painting the ‘image’ of the domestic interior, combine in spectral collision. These two opposing points of reference are often difficult bedfellows. Like these spectral imprints in Burris-Meyer’s books, this film work combines two images, one above the other, neither landscape nor portrait. This levelling transforms the usual viewing window of film, and stacks two worlds, in a short visual call and response; a version of ‘is there anyone there?’ a staple of the séance and ghostly apparition. In Ghost Grey, the historic haunted house is dissolved to its component parts. It is staged in the non-space, the corridor, the route from one domestic laboured task to another, a passage way that is made like the female laboured staff as invisible as possible. By rethreading these material elements this ghost story articulates the importance of material expression, as a form of aspirational beauty.