Rosie Ward – Reality Shifts….

When Rosie Ward first showed work at the National Review of Live Art (in 2003), there was a hint of mischievous trompe I’oeil in her cunningly precise recreation of something – a wall, doors – that we knew existed but which she had ‘prepared earlier’. So it was that we watched a re-presented history – doors opening etc – that didn’t just echo actuality or possibility, it predicted it too. Even though there was real complexity in the concept, and certainly a huge amount of technical skill, in this early work I suspect a lot of onlookers enjoyed it as a witty wee joke.

A year on, Ward returned to the NRLA with a piece that has, for many of us, changed our response to part of the building forever. In 2004, ward set up her pre-recorded digital images and sound score in a narrow corridor that, in access terms, went nowhere. Small groups – no more than four or five people – crowded together in the gloom at one end. What ensued was a haunting, of sorts. Footsteps travelled to and fro, sometimes seeming to come from behind us even – yet there was nothing corporal in sight. The corridor, dim-lit, looked as it usually did …. Perhaps a kind of ‘shimmer’ in the air, but nothing leapt out to say ‘this isn’t the place’.

Oh wow! A little white shape flits in and out of our field of vision. Voices. Music. I think, anyway – because what Ward does with insight and flair, is play on our tendency towards ‘collusion with the illusion’. Often we see, hear, what we expect to see and hear – ask policemen who have to take witness statements: the individual perceptions of an actual event can conjure up a host of differing recollections.
But Ward’s piece wasn’t simply a ‘ghost train’ spooky encounter. It was altogether subtler. It hinted at parallel universes that we don’t normally see in the everyday light/life. It reminded us that the Arches – a dank warren of brick-built 10th century vaults under Glasgow’s Central Station – had previous lives that we ‘brushed past’ without ever knowing anything about them. Had there been a lost child, wandering through those subterranean reaches? Or waifs, looking for warm places to home in on? Whatever story came to mind – and people instinctively try to make sense of story – lines – it was a moment of on-looker creativity triggered by Ward’s exceptional meshing of film, light, sound and shadow. I’m not exactly sure, now, what I saw. I do know that when I return to the Arches – which I do often, to review production – I find myself squinting sideways along that corridor, as if expecting the bricks to surrender some other visions of what lurks between the mortising and fabric of the building.

Ward’s magic – and it is that – is, of course, a highly sophisticated and thought – through exploration/manipulation of our powers of perception. Her work poses questions about reality – how do we locate ourselves/our experiences, how reliable are our senses when it comes to mapping or understanding events etc. Her ideas, which seem simple on the surface – you could sum up the 2004 NRLA piece in one sentence – are really artesian wells: the more you engage with them, the deeper they take you. But. Best of all. There is nothing pretentious or pompous about her work. What you see isn’t what you get, with Ward’s work – you also get an unexpected window into the workings of your own mind and imagination. More please!

Mary Brennan
Dance/Performance Critic, The Herald (Glasgow)
Post NRLA 2004.

‘I’m not exactly sure, now, what I saw. I do know that when I return to the Arches – which I do often, to review a production – I find myself squinting sideways along that corridor, as if expecting the bricks to surrender some other visions of what lurks between the mortising and fabric of the building’,

Mary Brennan, Dance/Performance Critic, The Herald (Glasgow), post NRLA 2004.

© Rosie Ward 2010
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