Celestial Light and Monstrous Races

“In Goddard’s Celestial Light and Monstrous Races, which as an installation uses 8 video monitors, the sound of bells edits the flow of images. She has quoted the line ‘like sweet bells jangled and out of time and harsh’ from Hamlet, describing it as a “metaphor for the deranged mind”. Goddard’s piece is in harmony thematically and emotionally, with her earlier work, largely single-monitor tapes, in which she explored a tension between “whole” objects and their fragmentation, decomposition and essential fragility, often with witty nuances. Much of her previous work has been an ironic observation of the reality of objects, usually every-day-ones, and domestic events which are broken down using the effects of the video medium, and also importantly through sound. Partly celebratory, Celestial Light and Monstrous Races yet has a sense of distance, not only of emotional impulse, but also through some memory of the past. For the peal of bells is a richly associative one in our culture, of a common voice heralding a personal moment – of marriage, of death and of religious ritual. The work, in the final analysis explores the cusp of nature and culture, finding the most exposed nerve, the fine crack in human experience where emotion finds an objective and cultural form through the intervention of the imagination.”

– Mike O’Pray