Messy Business
Journeying through six passages of time, Messy Business is 20 minute video work made by artists Sarah Cole & Annis Joslin working with women who attend Joining Hands Joining Hearts, a support charity supporting women who have experienced domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Playful, insistent, dark yet uplifting, Messy Business is an elegy to their wisdom, resilience and pain, giving a voice to those who kept quiet for too long but who now want to shout off the rooftops. You can view the final film here
Messy Business was also People United's 'Self Identity' Commission 2018-2019.
Sarah Cole and Annis Joslin were commission by the People United in association with Joining Hands Joining Hearts (a support charity for victims and survivors of sexual and domestic abuse).
We worked with the group for a year to make the film. There is a blog of the project on the People United Website you can read here.
To date, the video Messy Business has been presented at the Social Art Network in Sheffield (Nov 2018, as work-in-progress), Sittingbourne’s Avenue Theatre (December 2018, for an audience of participants and their families), Fabrica, Brighton (Feb 2019, as a Making Space residency) and screened at the Cine-City, Brighton Film Festival in November 2019. The work has also been awarded as a Semi-Finalist in the Courage Film Festival, Berlin.
Below are some images of the process and images from the final film.
