The Independant on Sunday

A video is projected on to one wall of the empty gallery. It opens with a train leaving a station. It is night and the screen is blurred with pools of orange light like an expressionist painting. There is a sense of tristesse, of something lost.
 
The scene switches to two women drinking tea. They are involved in some sort of cataloguing, looking at small objects through a magnifying lens. As they drain their teacups, the elder begins to read the tealeaves in the cup of the younger. She is enigmatic, evasive. She tells the younger woman that she can see birds sitting on a branch, that the tealeaves are not birds but the young woman’s questions.
 
The young woman is baffled. Her companion then announces that she’s mistaken, that they are not, in fact, the young woman’s questions but the answers to her questions. Throughout this dialogue there are episodic flashbacks of the younger woman watching falcons, often through a narrow aperture in a fence, apparently at the zoo. These intermittent images act as coda and refrain, the birds becoming transformed, in the mind of the viewer, into questions concerning the nature of memory and reality.
 
In this short dreamy piece, with its broken, circular and inconclusive narratives, Jaki Irvine has constructed something closer to a poem than a story - a mood, imbued with longing and desire, rather than an unfolding sequence - that exposes our compulsive need to make sense of emotions and episodes from the past that will not easily be categorised.