In 2011 Visual artist Heidi Kumao broke her back while sledding. During the
slow convalescence, Kumao spent many hours lying on her sofa staring up at the
ceiling. She describes it as like being “Underwater looking up at a layer of
ice.“
Her film, Swallowed
Whole, which was featured in the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film
Festival, Tricky Women International Animation Film Festival, the Atlanta Film
Festival and just won Best Experimental Film at the 13th Annual Female Eye
Film Festival in Toronto is a wonderfully evocative portrayal of this personal
calamity.
Kumao employs
striking images and interesting techniques in her filmmaking. For instance, at
one point, she makes the film frames thwack down like the lenses in an
ophthalmologist’s phoropter to emulate the crashing down to the ground of
her airborne sled.
She uses stacks of
books, cookies and lifesavers to recreate the impact and shattering of
vertebrae, and later on, melted ice cubes. These ordinary items are
amusing and very effective stand-ins, adding a breath of fresh air to this
grave and beautiful film.
The final
shot—taken in the Arctic Circle—features Kumao standing on an ice floe, a lone,
fragile figure in this inhospitable and awe-inspiring landscape. It’s a
humbling and haunting image.
Egress, inspired
by Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, is another
compelling film by Kumao. It’s actually a gallery installation as it includes a
blank book-shaped stack positioned to one side. Images are projected on the
books so they appear as if bound in gold tooled Moroccan leather and
subsequently, the Iranian flag effectively signaling the change from valued
literature to government approved tomes. In the film, chador-clad women circle
around the stack, like moths to a flame. Indeed, the billowing of the chador’s
material becomes the fluttering of butterfly/wings. A giant hand, holding a pin
hovers and then stabs a butterfly woman pinning her to the wall. But there is a
hopeful ending as a woman struggles up a tower to fly a kite, the giant hand returns
with giant scissors. They aim for the kite string but somehow manage to cut the
dreary smog laden background, which swings open like a squeaky door to reveal a
beautiful cerulean sky. It’s a gem of a film: poetic, moving and profound
In her studio Kumao
is working with the film snippets she makes and keeps on her computer. To help
organize the clips, she sketches images on index cards, which makes it easy to
arrange in the order she wants. One wall of her studio was covered with an
arrangement of these cards. While they were really just a guide, they provided
a striking collage of her personal language of hieroglyphics.
Kumao was also
working on two mechanical sculptures that emulate the movement of a little
girl’s legs and feet. One set of “legs” stamped its foot, the other seemed to
belong to a child lying on the floor pushing its legs back and forth in the
throes of a tantrum. The “legs “ were plain metal struts, what made the
anthropomorphizing so effective was the addition of vintage mary janes, which
also added a whiff of creepiness.
Kumao’s work
showcases her easy and consummate command of her media. It has elegance and
gravitas and also these moments of sly humor that add a refreshing lightness to
the work. heidikumao.net
