Suky Best has a long-running fascination with the clash occasioned by encounters between well-groomed domestic interiors and nature run wild. In The Journey Home (1999) she ‘wanted to make an image as if the room was being menaced by vegetation…Trees might burst through windows to claim back their own.’ She is also inspired by specific buildings, as in Walking Meditation (2000) made in and for Cleeve Abbey, a thirteenth century Cistercian ruin in Somerset. A third concern is with the way the simplification of an image can disturb perception. This is achieved in the video series 'Wild West' (2005), made in collaboration with Rory Hamilton, in which a group of cowboys on horses riding across a plain is reduced to a shimmering volatile bock of colour from which all other information has been removed.
These various interests and strategies are evident in the animations shown here in 'Wild Interior', the latter most notably in 'An Observation of Flight' (2010), in which a Peregrine Falcon’s movements, seen in silhouette, are tracked against a rotating latticework cage across and within which it flies. Reduced to a ragged white blur, the bird sometimes resembles a clutch of falling leaves or even paint dripping from a brush. The rotating grid pattern imposes a malleable three-dimensionality that clashes with the two dimensionality of the bird. Such clashes, or interplay, structure all the work seen here, which can be thought of as hybrid: time-based collages that combine non-temporal photo-reproduced elements, populated by cut-out loops of footage of real birds, energized and animated by a virtual camera.
For Best the work ‘refers to the interior spaces of computer games and their first person point of view’, and although the piece is structured loosely round alternating views of corridors and object groupings, the whole is constructed as a continuous fly-through. The camera finds a path between all these contrasting elements, unifying everything it encounters into a sequence of surfaces to be negotiated. But this unifying process also generates the many anomalies of scale and texture that reveal the nature of the work’s construction. Here, perhaps, one might think of the way the inexperienced gamer finds himself bumping against the pixilated boundary wall of the game’s universe. But although gaming environments are often hostile and dangerous, they are never uncanny, as they are in Betty’s house, which the humans have abandoned, leaving an eerily empty scene reminiscent of that described in the story of the Mary Celeste. Text by Nicky Hamlyn.