In Sunday Afternoon (2000), the artist is seen lying on the floor while her lurcher dog licks and touches her, its legs at first glance resembling an old man’s bony limbs. With its slow pace, the video plays with the uncertain identity of the figures in the grainy, anthropomorphising image. Over a short span of time, the fragmented bodies seem to engage in a gentle, almost erotic entanglement, mixing a physical, almost inhuman intensity with a domestic allure. This performance for camera was made as a response to a newspaper article the artist read about people found dead in their homes with their pets, opening up questions about the conditions which reveal animality/primal expression, the nature of performance and what happens in private, domestic spaces? This work was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2001 and was a film Williams Gamaker made in the last year of her BA Fine Art at Middlesex University.
in memory of Heidi Williams (1997-2010), creative collaborator, friend and multiple award-winner.
