Untitled (My Way Home + -, resting pulse)
1998
silent video
duration: infinite loop
starring: Stephen Archibald
exhibited:
Mark Dean: Dust, Laurent Delaye Gallery, London, 1999
Mommy Dearest, Gimpel Fils, London, 2000
The Beginning of The End, Beaconsfield, London, 2010
bibliography:
Roy Exley, ‘Mark Dean: Dust’, Untitled, No. 18, Spring 1999
Sue Hubbard, ‘Mark Dean: Laurent Delaye Gallery’, Time Out, February, No. 1076
Mommy Dearest, Gimpel Fils, London, Catalogue
© acknowledgements:
My Way Home (1978) →
This work consists of a clip from My Way Home (1978, dir. Bill Douglas, starring Stephen Archibald) superimposed on the same clip played backwards, slowed to 2 dissolved frames per second. My Way Home is the third of a trilogy of autobiographical films by Douglas. The films represent the childhood and youth of the filmmaker, born into poverty, and introduced to the world of art through his relationship with a more experienced man. When embarking on his first film, the director travelled back to where he grew up, in search of an actor to play himself. At a bus stop he met the young Stephen Archibald, who, in a strange reflection, he introduced to the world of art as the star of My Childhood. “Of course, the inevitable had happened and he wanted to act for the rest of his days” wrote Douglas. Unlike the character he played however, Stephen Archibald did not escape his childhood home, and died in 1998 in unknown circumstances, following a life punctuated by illness, drugs and prison. Earlier, he had said: “I always waited on Bill coming back with another film. And then he died and my film career was finished. I’ll never make another one.”