Weeks after being discharged from hospital with Covid-19, Fry presents illness as an interruption to the vital duration of a lifespan, played out here on her frail body. She makes manifest the unseen progress of infection through a shifting sequence of flowers, a morphing background and a soundtrack of deteriorating breaths. From her opening inhale, she lies precariously on top of a changing world that conveys her ever-deeper into an enveloping entropy before gently releasing her to exhale once more. Her eyes remain externally fixed, both distancing her from the inside of her body, now beyond her control, and imploring the attention of a witness, blinking only as a new flower comes to worsen or lessen her malady. Fry draws on the history of flowers as a metaphor for illness, from the depiction of Victorian women wracked with tuberculosis as fragile ‘fading flowers,’ to the surreal world of Boris Vian’s L’Ecume des Jours whose heroine develops a water lily on her lung and must be surrounded by flowers to heal while her home shrinks and decays. Recalling Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist whose descent into madness plays out in the chimerical yellow wallpaper of her confining room, Fry transforms the blue curtains of her hospital cubicle into a simultaneous representation of her deteriorating lungs and the hallucinatory effects of isolation. Following the tradition of surrealist artists Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn, in A deal with god Fry charts her journey to the beyond and back again.
Katharine Fry is a London-based artist working from performance into video. She recently completed practice-based PhD 'House Arrest' at Goldsmiths. She exhibits nationally and internationally, including: Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, USA (2019); Visions in the Nunnery, London (2018); Terror Has No Shape, Camden Arts Centre, London (2018), Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland (2018), Oriel Davies Open, Newtown, Wales, (2018); and The Modern Language Experiment, Folkestone Triennial, (2017). Recent prizes include: Hauser & Wirth First Prize and Soho House Mentoring Prize for Black Swan Open (2018) and First Prize for Creekside Open (2017).
