GWENBA, Jessa Mockridge, Joseph Noonan-Ganley

Focal point Gallery is proud to present moving image works by GWENBA, Jessa Mockridge and Joseph Noonan-Ganley, selected as part of Open Call: Big Screen Southend. The selection panel was comprised of Inês Costa, Curator at Focal Point Gallery, Ruth Jones, artist, independent curator, lecturer, and Director of The Old Waterworks and Morgan Quaintance, artist and writer, working in film and moving image.

Screened daily between 12–1pm and 3–4pm on Big Screen Southend from 1 September to 31 October 2024.

Films in order of appearance:

GWENBA, O’HYD[RA], 2023, video, 06:11 mins

O’HYD[RA] is a short film based on water, memory, time & cycles. The ability to heal and regenerate our sense of self and being after loss. For generations my family has been drawn to a beach in west Wales as a place of restoration. The narrative unfolds in conjunction with the life cycle(s) of an “immortal” microorganism known as hydra. A genus of small freshwater organisms that regenerates its cells every 20 days.

Jessa Mockridge, Spivak_rub, 2022–23, 15 mins

A library worker on night shift is rubbing out the pencil markings in a heavily fingered and marked book by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She re-traces the circles and crosses and annotations and brackets, imagining who made these marks. The monologue is punctuated by snippets of underlined theory and attempts to piece together the handwritten notes. The film documents a choreography of hand gestures. Thinking with José Esteban Muñoz’s ‘queer ephemera’ (queer related objects, such as letters and posters, that were intended to be used/enjoyed for a short period of time instead of being preserved or collected); rubbing out – re-performing the gestures that made the pencil marks – shares kinship to print-making rather than erasure. The repetitive gestures encourage an escape from work – a fantasy! The narrative is carried by animated open captions that situate the viewers as readers. Drawing on Laura U Mark’s ‘haptic visuality’, seeing as touching; the film proposes listening as an embodied practice for the eyes, skin and mouth. Mockridge worked with Collective Text, an organisation specialising in providing creative captioning to make artists’ films accessible to D/deaf viewers, to build captions into the film from the outset.

Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Our Bed, 2022, 21:12 mins

This video work retells the famous story of a Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the Andes following a plane crash in 1972, previously told in newspaper articles, books, television shows and a Hollywood film. The video is narrated by the reconstructed voice of one of the players who describes the design, construction and use of the team’s emergency beds inside the fuselage of the wreckage. Images, sound and text from archives, mass media and personal notebooks make space for viewers to cohabit these beds, to partake in the imaginative composition that they create. The protagonist elaborates upon the methods that the boys improvised, drawing on an example: a contemporary alphabet fashioned out of jockstraps. This cliché of homosexual identification helps express the different contexts that the boys find themselves in (bed, plane, book).By interjecting footage of a live televised rugby match, rain and mud disturb the clean capture and transmission of the game. Streaks from the player’s bodies are animated into muddy smears on the video screen, activating their gestures and blurring the subsequent content for the viewers of this video.

About the artists:

GWENBA (b.1997) is a multidisciplinary [new:media] artist & designer based in Cardiff, Wales. Her work explores connection [both physical+digital] through a fascination with nature, organisms and storytelling. — non-somatic-touch, the soil and waters (and all the things that grow inside them). Biomorphic audio-visual artefacts from ancient futures = data x [♡]. She graduated from Falmouth University in 2019 with a first class honours degree in BA Fine Art, and her work has since been shown across the UK and internationally. This includes IKT, g39 [UK], Trinity Square Video [Canada], VAEFE [Netherlands], Projektion Darmstadt [Germany], London Short Film Festival, Mock Jungle [Italy], among many more. gwenba.com

Jessa Mockridge is an artist, writer and library worker from Cape Town living in London. She works with DIY print publishing, performance, moving image and sound. Mockridge is interested in the power dynamics of media in relation to bodies and a politics of listening; a feminist ear that can also be an eye, skin or fist. Recently, her work is focused on troubling The Library as a knowledge system and recording everyday acts of resistance. She has performed live at: David Dale Gallery, The Whitworth, PEER, Tate Modern, Cubitt, Whitechapel Gallery, X Marks the Bokship, Raven Row and hmn. Her writing is published by The Happy Hypocrite, SALT., TACO!, Sticky Fingers, TANK, Feminist Review, Performance Research and Manchester University Press. Spivak_rub is Mockridge’s first moving image work. She was the co-editor of PaperWork, an art writing print publication and event series, 2014-2019 and is currently an archivist for the Digital Archive of Artists Publishing (DAAP), Banner Repeater. Mockridge studied an MA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths, where she now works as the art librarian. jessamockridge.com

Joseph Noonan-Ganley (b.1987) is an Irish artist working across video, sculpture, photography, textiles and writing. He attended St. Joseph’s Secondary School in Tulla, Co. Clare, then at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin he undertook a BFA in Painting. Following this Joseph completed an MFA at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Exhibitions include Reflex Blue, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2023); Loading Bay, National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023), Our Bed, 6 Seville Place, Dublin (2022); Phoenix Art Space Invitation, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, (2022); I gave them to all the guys in the room, (Happy Hypocrite: Without Reduction), Book Works & Resonance FM, London, (2021). Artist publications include Modern Queers (2022); Without Reduction: The Happy Hypocrite, Book Works (2021); Our Prop Mud, Quotation Mark Quotation Mark/Nero Editions (2021); Bed Text, Mirror Lamp Press, (2021); The Cesspool of Rapture, MA Bibliothèque (2019). josephnoonanganley.com