1996–2001 Iris

Iris is a work in several discrete thematically related sections: Points in Time, a durational performance in which the artist embroidered images of a blue flower, International Performance Festival, Waterford, Ireland, 1996; an extensive series of drawings, collages, texts and performances including a tattooing of the blue flower, 1996–1998; culminating in Iris Document 4, an experimental work on CD-Rom presented as two simultaneous adjoining video programs, one documenting the process of tattooing, the other showing close-ups of the artist’s eye movements during the process, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, 2001.

“The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.”

Quote in Ross’s Iris file from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”