Film

Self Dialogues: Hard Food (2022), Six-Channel Film (6m 20s)

‘Hard Food’ is the first chapter of ‘Self Dialogues’, an ongoing multi-part, immersive photographic and moving image series which reveals Pinkerton’s personal meditations on themes traversing migrational loneliness, love and desire, family/household tension, coloniality and cultural memory.

Chapter 1, ‘Self Dialogues: Hard Food’, excavates and focuses on Pinkerton’s personal journey since migrating to England from Jamaica in 2016. The title, ‘Hard Food’, derived from a term used in Caribbean society to denote ‘any starchy agricultural product used as food’ at Pinkerton’s hands takes on a more metaphorical function to signify thoughts or realisations that are hard to swallow or confront. ‘Self-Dialogues: Hard Food’ operates as a self-confessional and diaristic artwork through which Pinkerton unravels different stems and sentiments of her personal experience of migration, with feelings of isolation, contradiction, belonging, detachment, limbo, and oneness running through the work.

The 6-channel film, which lies at the centre of ‘Self Dialogues: Hard Food’, features original material shot on 16mm and Super 8 film. Harnessing juxtaposition and montage to convey the artist’s internal narrations, the viewer witnesses Pinkerton’s thoughts, memories, and feelings fleet by like a locket of secrets, as if we were sitting in her brain.