Josephine Pryde, the Visual Arts judge for Ivan Juritz Prize 2020:
“Elisabeth Brun’s film 3 x Shapes of Home is a very subtly, finely timed piece of work that launches a kind of weightless shuttle to take us between voice, text and image as it unfolds in its examination of place. Her ability to narrate, to not flinch at the reality of a narrator’s role, to risk the ‘let’s try’ of the teacher…but not to reduce to didacticism at any point – offers us a freedom as a viewer to navigate her film and move between the thoughts of what we are seeing and assessing as we go.
‘It’s about forms and how they shape the way we see,’ the narrator tells us at one point, and it is, but in terms of judging an artist’s work, it is also about having the courage to attempt to create a form as you go, to embed yourself in the film’s material, almost, and to move with it.
All the judges responded to this work’s beautifully timbred construction and the concerns threaded through it for a sense of place, for what can be called grounded, what can be called untethered.
Plus in our omniscience as judges, we did also permit ourselves to think that while the awareness of sound in the film was acute and that no music was probably a deliberate choice, that a residency with a composer as well as with a writer might be of interest to Elisabeth Brun.
There was also that moment for me as a judge in it when I saw something I had not seen before – this is quite different to seeking to reward something called ‘originality’ – it is more like being given the chance to realise something you knew you wanted to see, but hadn’t, or hadn’t even realised you could see that thing until you did see it, and maybe it has been done before by someone else, but you just have not seen it, but that does not matter – anyway – in a film that opened with a reflection on time being oceanic, towards the end a split screen affords us two views – the underwater shot fish swimming but hooked, and the fish pulled from the water from the boat, and this was so direct and so fresh a view as to fascinate me totally.
Early on, the narrator speaks to us of, “The freedom to leave, and the freedom to come back…back and forth, back and forth – the freedom to come back, the freedom to leave – that kitchen holding me..”
An unexpected poignancy to hear those words now, in these days where we are obliged to be holding this prize giving on a video conference, but I don’t think it’s a poignancy that has been leant to these words by the moment alone at all, I don’t mean it in any kind of exploitative way, I mean rather perhaps that it’s poignancy that sounds on a collision with a committed search for a truth in a set of situations”
Jury statements for all winners and runner ups 2020 in the journal Textual Practice, Taylor and Francis, 35:5, 707-708,
“Elisabeth Brun’s film 3 x Shapes of Home is a very subtly, finely timed piece of work that launches a kind of weightless shuttle to take us between voice, text and image as it unfolds in its examination of place. Her ability to narrate, to not flinch at the reality of a narrator’s role, to risk the ‘let’s try’ of the teacher…but not to reduce to didacticism at any point – offers us a freedom as a viewer to navigate her film and move between the thoughts of what we are seeing and assessing as we go.
‘It’s about forms and how they shape the way we see,’ the narrator tells us at one point, and it is, but in terms of judging an artist’s work, it is also about having the courage to attempt to create a form as you go, to embed yourself in the film’s material, almost, and to move with it.
All the judges responded to this work’s beautifully timbred construction and the concerns threaded through it for a sense of place, for what can be called grounded, what can be called untethered.
Plus in our omniscience as judges, we did also permit ourselves to think that while the awareness of sound in the film was acute and that no music was probably a deliberate choice, that a residency with a composer as well as with a writer might be of interest to Elisabeth Brun.
There was also that moment for me as a judge in it when I saw something I had not seen before – this is quite different to seeking to reward something called ‘originality’ – it is more like being given the chance to realise something you knew you wanted to see, but hadn’t, or hadn’t even realised you could see that thing until you did see it, and maybe it has been done before by someone else, but you just have not seen it, but that does not matter – anyway – in a film that opened with a reflection on time being oceanic, towards the end a split screen affords us two views – the underwater shot fish swimming but hooked, and the fish pulled from the water from the boat, and this was so direct and so fresh a view as to fascinate me totally.
Early on, the narrator speaks to us of, “The freedom to leave, and the freedom to come back…back and forth, back and forth – the freedom to come back, the freedom to leave – that kitchen holding me..”
An unexpected poignancy to hear those words now, in these days where we are obliged to be holding this prize giving on a video conference, but I don’t think it’s a poignancy that has been leant to these words by the moment alone at all, I don’t mean it in any kind of exploitative way, I mean rather perhaps that it’s poignancy that sounds on a collision with a committed search for a truth in a set of situations”
Jury statements for all winners and runner ups 2020 in the journal Textual Practice, Taylor and Francis, 35:5, 707-708,