A script and a recording bookend a performance: two points of stillness that open and close an act and all that is at play.

Sitting poised ahead of speech, a script is a plan and a directive to action. The script’s iteration fulfils its intention, but it is an inherently passive object; it waits to be acted.

After his death, when clearing out his house, Mum found Uncle Roger’s furled script from a 1960 school production of Toad of Toad Hall (a dramatization of Wind in the Willows) in which he starred as Toad. Illicitly unreturned and then kept by him for fifty-one years, this script is a record of breath expended, words spoken, lines acted. Loosed from its original use, the script’s fragile pages turn through once again to reveal the lines, notes and drawings of its now-absent actor.

Slide installation, 2012
(Each page of the script was photographed, back and front, and each set installed in separate projectors. Slides photographed by Yoon Tae Kim.)