RADIANT

Merilyn Fairskye 2015-17
Single-channel vertical video installation
Duration: 12:54, stereo sound

Radiant, a vertical video installation, was originally made in response to an opportunity to exhibit on the MediaWall in the Commons foyer at Bath Spa University, Newton, UK. A revised version was made in 2017. Taking landscape into the expanded portrait format, it situates the viewer in a corporeal relationship to the unfolding scenes.

It was shot on location at Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing and decomissioning site near Seascale, Cumbria, UK; The Polygon, decommissioned Soviet nuclear test site, Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan; Ranger Uranium Mine, Kakadu National Park, NT, Australia, and Dungeness Nuclear Power Station B, Kent, UK.

There is no overarching narrative here, instead, a flow of fragments that accumulates to build a sense of the precariousness of the atomic enterprise, and the vulnerability of the landscapes and the (unseen) people who live with it and who inhabit its aftermath. The visual drivers are the sites themselves, what is to be found there and what they suggest. The emotional driver is the underlying pathos of the brevity of human life set against the longevity of radiation.

Original version (November 2015): duration: 12:54, stereo sound.
Revised version (March 2017): duration: 11:40, stereo sound

(Production assisted by Bath Spa University; Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (C.O.R.E.), Cumbria, UK; National Nuclear Center, Kazakhstan; Vitosha Australia.)

Installation: Media Wall, Commons Building, Bath Spa University, Newton UK. October-November 2015