THE ROOT IS NERVOUS

The Root is Nervous is a video by artist Alice Banfield that combines stop animation and overlaid clips from a performance. Set in a sensory forest landscape, it shows a cast of playful, seemingly innocent, characters, navigating rituals of medication, social anxiety, and masked spirits. 

Through considering the forest as a safe space and sentient being that can offer empathy to the characters within it, Alice draws on ideas from Ursula K Le Guin who, in the short story Vaster Than Empires and More Slow, uses the forest as a metaphor for the mind. A forest is something ‘unexplored, unending…’ and somewhere we get lost in, each night alone. The Ian Watson essay explores this directly, comparing Le Guin’s short story to her novel The Word for World is Forest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Alice’s forest, a skittish character, Blue, runs through the trees and encounters a Sertraline Maiden, who ritually dispenses antidepressants. Named after their chosen brand of antidepressant medication, Sertraline Maidens are recurring characters in Alice’s work, and are used to explore the transactional relationship people can have with these pills.

By transforming the mundane daily task of taking medication into imagined folklore, where tablets are placed as offerings, Alice frames this transaction as ‘trading with the devil’, where unwanted side effects, or the ‘emotional blunting’ that comes with long term use, lurk as hidden consequences in the exchange.

 

 

These rituals can also be seen as a form of masking. The challenge of this is embodied by the disruptive presence of a snake, a predatory animal that expects eye-contact. Alice reflects on their own experience of social anxiety, and the itchy feeling she experiences from stares, in the slurping sounds of the snake as it licks the masked spirit.

The Root is Nervous, like Alice’s wider practice considers the similarities between autistic people masking and the shapeshifting of their imagined creatures, as they both feel compelled to change themselves to adapt to the environment.

 

 

For Torn Together The Root is Nervous was shown alongside two other video works in an Online Screening.

Elements from this exhibition, and the rest of our programme, will be shared across our digital platforms. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to make sure you don’t miss out.

 

 

 

ALICE BANFIELD

Alice Banfield is an artist based in Cardiff, Wales, who narrates their own experiences of being autistic with characters that are playful (and slightly petty) to challenge the language around autism and its representation in media culture, as it is often portrayed as a disease that needs to be cured.