The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Sara Pathirane’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the first in a new suite of video works in which she studies the human body in the moving image. The work is a paean to the movements of humankind and nature, to the fragility and power of nature’s elements, and to all the women who inhabit this earth. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a silent video triptych with three characters. The choreographers Iina Taijonlahti, Suvi Tuominen and Laura Pietiläinen move in dialogue with the landscape: an ice-cold stream and a frozen swamp in eastern Lapland; cliffs faces at Petra in Jordan; 300-year-old lava fields on Lanzarote; two-billion-year-old wave patterns in the bedrock at Koli, Finland; and Kung Fu exercises at the foot of Songshan, a mountain in Henan Province, China. Pathirane uses Chroma key compositing to unite body movements and shapes with the landscape. Her work has deep roots in painting; in The Ground Beneath Her Feet she retains watercolour painting’s fluid, spontaneous, intractable character.