V Walton (1994)

Date:
2025

Medium:
Single-channel video installation with sound (2:58 mins)

One Body is a video and performance work in which the artist’s body merges with the forest floor. Layers of transparent forest imagery obscure and reveal their presence as Walton engages with the soil, dissolving the boundaries between the body and the natural world. The work was created on the land of the Monacan people, near Blacksburg, Virginia.

Visual Description by V Walton

In this piece, we see a scene of a large forest floor with several small green plants framing the screen. Through the use of multiple layered images of film, we can see various transparencies. A Black person kneels down in the frame and uses their fingers to feel the soil before grabbing a short stick to dig into the ground. The scene changes. We see several layers of film that overlap. One, where is a close-up of myself digging into the earth. The other is where my body is laying amongst ferns on a forest floor. Through the transparency of the video, my fingers move soil across the screen and settle where my body is. Through multiple rounds and motions, I eventually stop and then walk away, and my body becomes hidden amongst soil and plants where I can barely be seen at all.

Ambient sound fills the gallery from One Body. We hear soil shifting and roots being unraveled and disrupted. We hear birds chirping. All these sounds work together to bring us outside.

Courtesy of the artist BMA