Portia Haddon

• Untitled (Screen) 2025. Inkjet print on enhanced matte paper

• Untitled (Box) 2025. Inkjet print on enhanced matte paper

• Untitled (Screen II) 2025. Inkjet print on enhanced matte paper

• Untitled (Rooftop) 2025. Inkjet print on enhanced matte paper

• Letters, 2026. Single channel digital video; 1:28 minutes. Insincerity, 2025. Single-channel digital video; 1 :11 minutes.

Portraiture is traditionally intended to reveal something about the nature of the subject. Women and domestic technology share a parallel in their common characterisations as malfunctioning and unreliable. The screen and the woman manifest trouble; they are not to be trusted. Furthermore, the right to gaze directly into the camera unflinchingly has been a historically masculine arena of visual control. The domestic television set is blamed for both the destruction of high culture and of family harmony. Actors such as Clint Eastwood and Buster Keaton are, in filmic memory, immortalised for how they stare back: the sprezzatura of the Western cowboy and the deadpan emptiness of the stuntman are not simply character behaviours, but performative attitudes to being watched. Portia’s abstract photographs were created by photographing an empty television screen at close range with a flash. A ghostly nebula of light seems to blossom behind this LED matrix, while stains and dust particles produce a mimesis of space. The black screen is a space of tension and hostility, yet also one of potential. The camera flash projects back off the dark screen in an image of both anticipation and nothingness. The woman casually emerges from this empty space in a synthesis of darkness that evokes Te Kore. These photographs are both casual documents, and heralds of dysfunctionality for the nuclear family unprepared for the woman artist.

Insincerity explores a comparison of the experience of being a woman to that as an instrument. The work shifts between abstraction, portraiture and intimate documentation of the piano itself, in order to explore silence, oppression, and limitation. Both frames and piano keys are bordered matter: each one is part of a larger puzzle, fraught with dark gaps in which sound and motion are absent: a borderland in which women exist. Both women and instruments are confined by expectations of form; notes and roles are both played matter. Through the use of overlays, the piano becomes a confine, and through rapid cutting, the subject of a performance; a thread of hair glinting on a piano key reveals the woman in abstract form.

If film is really going to confront the shortness of life, shouldn’t films also be as short as possible? Rather than showing a woman lying asleep for hours, in my films, I want to show her for just one second, or even less than a second. This was the first rule in Portia’s manifesto for filmmaking, written at the completion of a series of projects exploring the politics of women walking in film. Picking up the ethos of Fluxus and traditional political protest, in Letters, Portia explores how one might visualise a woman lost in thought while she walks. Creases in the page parallel cracks in the road. Who she is thinking of and what they have written to her remain unrevealed. This neighbourhood manifests as not quite an alternative reality, not exactly a dream, and nothing seems to be happening at all.