A dreamlike product of the long lockdown, ‘The Cook, the Cupboard and Joan of Arc’ draws on the tableau vivant of early renaissance painting and the films of second wave feminist performance artists to create a commentary on the dislocation and absurdity of quarantined life. A figure in apron and helmet moves through a confined, artificial space: watched by an array of sculptures, and tattered, distorted film stills from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (1928), they carry out increasingly deranged parodies of domestic acts. The confined space and the repetition of the figures actions works to illustrate the new and absurd temporalities generated by the collapse of our everyday life. But ‘The cook, the cupboard and Joan of Arc’ also critiques the ordinary performance of those gendered, anthropocentric, forms of life, as the artificial ecology of the main setting is intermixed with shots of a mysterious bunker. Caught between the absent present, a future that has failed to come, and an inaccessible past, ‘The cook, the cupboard and Joan of Arc’ asks whether the collapse of old life-worlds imprisons us; or opens the way to transcendence.

‘The cook, the cupboard, and Joan of Arc' was screened as part of the Cutlog selection for the SSA annual Exhibition at the RSA galleries in Edinburgh.The Exhibition runs from 31 October – 23 November 2021.