Artist:
Laura Gannon (lives and works in London).

Materials:
Two-channel film, Super-16mm film; 11 min. 

Description:
A film about Eileen Gray’s seminal (but now dilapidated) E1027 house.

“A house in Cap-Martin… was inspired by Eileen Gray’s letters to Le Corbusier about her house E1027. The building was designed by Gray with Jean Badovici between 1926 and 1929, and is located on the French Riviera, overlooking the Bay of Monaco. In her correspondence with Le Corbusier, Gray expresses the view that the murals he had painted inside the building were a form of vandalism and that she could never revisit the house…

“I’d first visited the site of Eileen Grey’s E1027 in 2006. At this time, the house was inaccessible and closed to the public. I was struck how in the iconic black-and-white archive images of the house, depicting it as gleaming, stranded ship attached to land, contrasted to the dilapidated condition that I found E1027 to be in. I’d heard that the house was about to be restored and converted into a study center for architects, and I became interested in capturing this moment before it ceased to function as a residential space.

“I devised three characters: a fictional older Eileen Gray circulating the exterior of the house depicted on the left screen, with Le Corbusier and Badovici shown measuring and discussing the interiors in slow motion on the right screen. The resulting film deliberately played with temporality—slowing time, merging past and present, combining fact and fiction.”
—Laura Gannon, “Career Development: Laura Gannon; Letting the Work Lead,” Visual Artists Ireland.