If Spring, Then Hope, And Also Winter1997

A meditation on the death of a young life, this video focuses on an image of a young girl, unconscious on a hospital bed, apparently dying.

Alternate responses to her death (one, matter-of-fact, speaking of "giving thanks in all things", the other distraught) are sung in liturgical style by two adult voices (male and female). This refrain is repeated over and over in successive re-recordings of itself – the words losing clarity with each round and eventually merging with the ambient sound of the space.

The image of the young girl on the hospital bed – and, later, family album snapshots of the girl with her sister and cousins at the beach (where, apparently, a fatal shark attack occurred) – is recognizably altered by the sound. Both sound and image develop an increasingly distant, abstract quality.

I made this piece both to recreate something of the sense of the dispersal of a person's spirit in death. I also wanted to express both beauty and coldness in relation to death (of a young child in particular) and to address the conflicts that come up accepting youthful death.