Artist’s Statement
of Experimental Filmmaker and Video Artist
Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe


The appeal of cinema to me lies in its ability to suggest the kind of knowledge that might be said to reside in the soul—hinted at by sound and visual associations, as if in a dream—and whether I follow, observe, deconstruct or altogether dispense with narrative, it is this affection for the ineffable that informs my work more consistently than anything else.

The non-structural content of my work is generally a foray into artistic and societal structures that I find confining or confusing—traditional narrative structure, television “realities,” notions of what is inherently feminine, etc. Storylines and ideas are opened to questions rather than presented as complete. My intent is to work towards an epiphany of opening rather than one of certitude.

Beyond this, however, my work is rooted in structural concerns, and as much as I explore myth-reality discrepancies, I am also exploring tensions between sound, image and text as elements which struggle to describe a certain meaning but which have their own agendas. The marrying of these elements in unfamiliar and unlikely juxtapositions serves to destabilize any viewer attempt to completely synthesize one meaning from the experience—but encourages them, I hope, to aesthetically appreciate and savour the experience of incompleteness and uncertainty.