Claudia Hart

In Ophelia, a 10-minute 3D animated loop, the body of a naked woman drifts at the bottom of the ocean. She is ‘perhaps dead or perhaps sleeping,’ an ambiguity heightened by the dreamlike atmosphere of the underwater world around her. To create this imagery, Hart turned to advanced scientific techniques, from physics to dynamic particle and optical simulation, yet the result is anything but clinical: her Ophelia remains a tragic and romantically erotic figure. The work returns to one of the most frequently depicted heroines in Western art, famously painted by John Everett Millais in the 19th century. Hamlet’s lover, who drowned herself for love of a man who had murdered her father, Ophelia has been written about by literary critics as a feminist figure embodying the Electra complex. The work can be shown as a high-definition video object or as a large-scale projected installation.