Matyas, 2018, Video Stills

Bara Palcik

Born in Brno, Czech Republic in 1982, Bara first started making short videos when she began formally studying art in Dublin, Ireland. These were typically short videos inspired by nature and her local surroundings, and created through experimentation with the materials in her immediate environment. Barbora is currently exploring the relationship between a mother/artist and her child through her art practice. She creates videos depicting her son’s early life, incorporating stop motion (claymotion) techniques. Her work is inspired by Czech fairy tales of the nineteenth century. Since Graduating in June 2018, she has received the A4 Sounds DIT Graduate Award 2018, the Multi-Media Fine Art Award 2018 sponsored by Image Now, was longlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Award 2018 and Matyas was selected for the Dublin Feminist Film Festival 2018.

www.palcik.com
Email: palcik4@gmail.com
Youtube: Bara Palcik

 

 

Matyas

The short film “Matyas” is inspired by a Czech fairy tale “Otesanek” written by Karel Jaromir Erben. The Czech folk tale from the nineteenth century talks about a living, constantly hungry, wooden log which eats its mother and its father and then continues eating other people. The end of this enormous eating is brought about by an old lady working in the fields who cuts through its wooden stomach and all the people jump out alive. “Matyas”, the story of the all-consuming nature of maternal love, talks about a single mother who is not unhappy but very tired. The mother struggles with her little baby. The baby never sleeps and eats a lot. All the time! The mother grows desperate as she tries to feed the baby with everything she can find in their home. Her milk is not enough, nor is porridge, fruit or vegetables. She gives him pork and chicken meat but nothing helps. Nothing she can find fills the baby, and he constantly cries and doesn’t sleep. Finally, after over 300 sleepless nights, the mother finds a solution to this constantly growing hunger. She takes a long shower and prepares herself: she shaves her legs and armpits, she washes her hair, she brushes her teeth, all so she can be clean and ready for her baby. She has, once and for all, realised how to fulfil her baby’s insatiable hunger.

 

 

Goodbye Sherkin, 2016

 

 

The video is a narrative of a woman who talks about her experience of escaping from a capital city to a small, remote island, where she enjoyed the space to make art. After sometime, she found herself isolated and after two and half years she realised that she missed Dublin, the place she ran away from.

 

 

Weekend with Amanda, 2015

 

Amanda Coogan’s visit to Sherkin Island, Co. Cork. Performed by 1st and 3rd year BAVA
students (DIT), recorded and edited by Barbora.

 

 

I Saw Her, 2014

 

Inspired by Dorothy Cross and her sculpture Everest Shark. Self-directed, recorded,
performed and edited.