laundering leaves

These are stills from some of my tactile film experiments – playing games of combining mundane domestic tasks with less obvious objects or materials.

This idea, of laundering leaves, is a theme that haunts me from a long way back, from my childhood in Prague: One time, when I was about 3 or 4, I invented a game in a playground, imagining large leaves that I picked in the park nearby as laundry, which I hung over the playground slide to dry.

I hold this memory as a significant event in my mental morphology – laundering leaves, the re-enactment of some future moment of being “all grown up” and doing the real chore (which seemed so enticing to my childhood mind) could never – in its intensity of childhood game of  imagination – be matched by the reality of the actual experience.

I realise now that what I try and capture in my work is, in some sense, the essence of this childhood experience.

And so – I keep on playing.

Images © Tereza Stehlikova