Laura Fitzgerald
Portrait of a Stone, 2018
Video. Video monitor dimensions: 21 x 22 x 34 cm
Portrait of a Stone is a two-channel video work, which the artist made during her Lucian Freud Residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2018. She made the film from her combined experiences of studying at the Royal College of Art, a former office job in London, and phone calls made to a NHS Mental Health Helpline. The work also interweaves a series of video portraits of the artist's father, which she created when she was worried that he might be dying. The piece is inhabited by stone characters, collected by the artist around her father's home in County Kerry, while out walking to “calm the nerves.”