Domestic is a film installation By Scott McDonnell that explores our relationship to the home, language, memory and nostalgia, where an audience walks through a gallery space resembling a household, each room features a one minute vignette that responds to, or ‘adapts’ an excerpt of text from a famous or prolific writer.
The Project came out of wanting to create a work that reflected the feeling of being stuck inside and a wanting for going to outside events at the end of a long lockdown. The idea of an art film installation centred around the home felt naturally grand in scope with a lot of potential and accessibility for Scott’s limitations and restrictions.
Scott then broadened his research to include something he has a large fascination with; Literature and language and its complicated relationship with film. This provided a framing device to the project, as choosing texts to respond to gave each vignette a level of focus and specificity.
In editing Scott played around with the use of colour and monochrome, seeing how removing colour from a frame could amplify the effect of lighting and shadow, something he had tried to play with naturally but wasn’t easily identifiable when in colour. The use of black and white also tied in well with the installations recurring themes of memory, nostalgia and film language.
Throughout production, Scott was influenced by the work of Charlie Kaufman, Maya Deren, David Lynch, and most importantly, the photography of Gregory Crewdson, whose photography used cinematic and even literary language to portray narrative in still images, and infuse the mundane with the surreal. Crewdson’s photography was highly influential on the composition and development of the vignettes.
For home viewing, Scott has developed a quadriptych that explores the Vignettes and their relationships to each other, visually and thematically, which can be found below, alongside a Mock-Up Programme for the installation, Which can provide an extra reference for the overall project.