BAD SHEEP – Nursery Crymes Edit

BAD SHEEP is a commissioned work consisting of short film and large scale sculptural installation, to exhibit as part of a touring site-specific promenade production by the theatre company ‘The Mischief La Bas’ ‘Nursery Crimes’ project. The project premiered in November 2017, the promenade performance taking place over two nights in and around the lanes, alleyways and shop windows of Trongate, Merchant City and Saltmarket, and also within the Panopticon. The show will tour to Dunoon and Findhorn (as part of the Findhorn Bay Festival) in summer 2018, Kosovo June 2018 (to be confirmed) and Graz in Austria later in 2018 (to be confirmed). Other artists and companies involved in the project are Liz Aggis Teatro Odi, Kosovo (Theatre Company), Dav Bernard, Glasgow (member of 85a artist collective), Hastings, MSL Projects/Radiator Arts (http://www.radiatorarts.co.uk), IN SITU (situ.info/en/) and Florent Mehmeti (http://www.teatriod). 

Fiona Robertson’s ‘Bad Sheep’ is a cross-medium examination of the way in which the grotesque and the mundane reflect and reshape our personal and collective memory. Utilising the surreal – but deeply rooted – imagery of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, Robertson seeks to build on previous work exploring the limits of expression through the showing of a short film within an on-site installation. The film – centred around an eponymous ‘Bad Sheep’ – is set within a liminal space, where elements of the artist’s rural childhood and her present-day urban life combine. Within this space, unreal characters and structures congregate, caught between different worlds – the subconscious and the conscious, the contemporary and the archaic, the fictional and the real. Mixing elements from medieval mummer’s shows, 1920s hallowe’en outfits, brechtian drama – and, of course, nursery rhymes, traditional issues of personal & artistic expression – gender, control of the self and the other, and the potential for true self-knowledge in a subjectivised world – are addressed in an unconventional setting.