Artist, Anna Falcini, commissioned Rick Goldsmith from Catcher Media to create a film from a performance piece. They have worked together previously but Methods to Speak was a site specific, performance work to be filmed as it happened at the boundary of La Villa des Brillants, Meudon, Paris. The house was formerly the private house and atelier of the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840 -1917), and is now a museum. The durational performance saw Falcini continuously circumambulating the perimeter of the house and garden for two hours, a gesture of memory that re-imagines the experiences of Welsh artist Gwen John (1876-1939) who did the same in the hope of meeting her lover, Rodin. Although John was never permitted to enter Rodin’s villa, her letters reveal her fantasies of seeing Rodin from a distance, in his garden or meeting him by chance at the gate. In the performance, Falcini wears a porcelain garland which is a reworking of an original garland of ivy that Rodin had created for his Whistler’s Muse sculpture for which Gwen John had modelled.
