FLORENCE

I sit at my computer cutting up real time footage of waterfalls, snow storms, boiling water. I combine these to make threads of moving images. I look and listen to the result in front of me and I think of people whose actions transcend fear—not in a momentary instinctual way—but over a sustained period of time. The name Florence Nightingale comes to mind, a woman whose name has become a cliche but of whom I know so little. I order books from Amazon of her writings and select phrases spread over hundred of pages to make a soliloquy or poem. We collaborate. Words float vertically down the screen with its own position, transparency and speed. A slow sense of reading, time and sound unfolds.

Florence, born in 1820, intensely rejects her upper-class English background to seek a life of meaning and purpose apart from that designated by birth. At thirty-four, she sets off with a ragtag group of women to save men outside of Istanbul during the brutal Crimean War and transforms what had been complete neglect on the battlefield into a system of caring for the wounded. The year is 1854.