THE GROTTO
"The Grotto" consists of a painted backdrop of a grotto (cave), measuring 14’ wide by 8’ high. Video with sound is projected onto this backdrop, animating the painting with a variety of creatures, from nymphs to birds and seashells. A small electronic water wheel is positioned in the centre of the gallery, and lit with an LED light. This is filmed with a webcam, and the video feed is projected onto the bottom third of the painting, animating it with images of submerged paper boats and wax shells.
This work contemplates the grotto, specifically the artificial garden grotto - most popular in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. These grottoes resemble caves, with the addition of fountains, sculptures of nymphs and Greek and Roman gods, automata such as mechanical singing birds, seashells and corals from Africa and the West Indies. (Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam. "Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe." (2022): 243-245.)
"The Grotto" touches upon the garden grotto’s place in colonial history through parody and repetition. (Tradii, Laura. “Petrified Waters: The Artificial Grottoes of the Renaissance and Beyond.” The Public Domain Review, publicdomainreview.org/essay/petrified-waters. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025.) It is part painting and part projection - a fiction. Classical nymphs (played by me) lounge disinterestedly on their smartphones. A crude mechanical bird keeps time like a cuckoo clock until it unceremoniously drops dead, only to reappear seconds later. A painting of a bust of a Classical goddess flips up and down in time with the strum of a harp. A marionette with billowing green hair intermittently plays the conch trumpet, summoning the image of a spinning shell from the center cavity. In front of this video installation, a small mechanical water wheel pushes shells and paper boats in circles. This water sculpture is filmed with a webcam. The live-feed video is projected onto the bottom half of the video installation. Sounds of bells, water, birds, harps and conch horns fill the air. The colour palette of The Grotto slowly shifts, cycling through both dark and light palettes. Pulling from my experience as a painter, I used colour theory to optically mix the colours in my painting with those of my mapped video projection. Here, the bright reds in my painting read as deep purplish greys when overlaid with the turquoise light of my projection, and so on.
In its presentation, The Grotto pulls from the material history of the theatrical backdrop. In early film screenings, there was a practice of constructing theatrical sets to contextualize the filmic image within the material world. For example, in 1914 the stage of the Vitagraph Theater in New York consisted of a semi-permanent set depicting the interior of a house. Behind a large window at its center hung a painted simulation of a sky. At showtime, the sky backdrop was seamlessly replaced by a projection screen, and viewers would watch the film through the window of the house. The Grotto references this footnote in media history. By overlaying my theatrical backdrop with video projection, I’m contextualizing the video image within the material world.
This work also draws from the tradition of Tableaux Vivant - a practice of staging static reproductions of well-known narrative, figurative artworks using costumed actors or models. These scenes were often presented on theatrical stages. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a subgenre of the Tableau Vivant arose called Poses Plastiques, that featured nude models. The Grotto mirrors this form of presentation through its general stillness and near-static figures, albeit through the lens of new media.