Rosemary Butcher

“After The Last Sky” was one of Britain’s first dance-video installations ever shown at the Royal College of Art London in 1995. Inspired by Edward W. Said’s book of the same name about exile life in Palestine, in this piece Rosemary Butcher is concerned with the condition of people living elsewhere after fleeing their homeland. Seeking to capture the complexity of individuals being caught with limited opportunities, the work deals with bodies in enclosed spaces, feelings of uncertainty and being unsettled. Butcher creates a place of mental and physical boundaries, immersing the audience in a condensed space surrounded by four screens that display images captured by cameras recording multiple aspects of a person from four angles. The audience too are caught up in the cross-current of events in a cross-patterned spatial structure, which however always is juxtaposed with and released by the possibility of the open sky.