(m)other

For the present exhibition at t1+2 Artspace the novelist, filmmaker, critic, musician and performance artist Stewart Home has brought together the results of his own researches into his mother's mysterious death in 1979 with the work of the photographer and video artist Chris Dorley-Brown.

'The running story in the Kensington News at the end of 1979', reports Home, 'was the hunt for a school boy. However what most interests me in the 7 December 1979 edition is a tiny paragraph tucked at the bottom of an inside page. Under the heading "Found Dead" are these words: 'Julia Callan-Thompson was found dead in her basement flat in Cambridge Gardens on Sunday December 2. Police say there were no suspicious circumstances.' There was no follow-on reporting in subsequent editions of the newspaper.' Home's interest in this item is that Julia Callan-Thompson was his mother, a woman who had had a 'long involvement with bohemianism and the drug subculture' - 'her biography is also closely bound up with many of the things that continue to fascinate all of us about the swinging sixties. My mother had an action packed and sometimes troubled life. She was thirty-five when she died...in the back basement flat at 104 Cambridge Gardens on 2 December 1979.'

Employing similar poses to those found in would-be promotional photographs of Home's mother taken by Carla Hopkins in 1966, Dorley-Brown has photographed Home himself, merging together the two sets of images so as to produce a series of composite portraits of Julia aged 22 and her son Stewart aged 42.

A further contribution to the examination of Julia's death takes the form of Home's film The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex. This is an intensely personal work which brings together Home's cultural theory and his own family history. Avant-garde techniques and the avant-garde obsession with death are interwoven with the life and death of Home's mother. Images of Julia working as a fashion model and club hostess are cut against an at times deliberately disassociated soundtrack that uses stories about her (including her involvement with beatnik and hippie countercultures, heroin addiction and Julia's quest for spiritual enlightenment, and especially her mysterious death in 1979), in an exploration of the limits of documentary film and of how the avant-garde is both an _expression of love and of loss. The film also implicitly comments upon how key aspects of radical Lettrist cinema of the early 1950s were commercialised in the late works of French filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais.

Accompanying these maternally-transfixed depictions is Dorley-Brown's sixtysix-ninetynine, a companion piece to Michelangelo Antonioni's seminal 1966 film, Blow Up. Widely regarded as a microcosmic depiction of "swinging" London, the original film, documenting 24 hours in the life of London's hippest fashion photographer (played by David Hemmings) here acts as a foil to Dorley-Brown's remake of this modern classic. Dorley-Brown's latter-day reconstruction involved him in filming at the exact London locations used in the original, employing no actors but reconstructing, shot by shot, Blow Up's complex and notorious park sequence. Devoid of dialogue, sixtysix-ninetynine employs the soundtrack of Antonioni's film, without edits and in real time. In ghosting this important, strangely loaded work Dorley-Brown attempts to unearth what has happened to the mythologised landscape of sixties London during the 33 years since Blow Up was made.