To coincide with her gallery exhibition, Skydde, MattFlix is pleased to present Iris [A Fragment] (2018), by Imogen Stidworthy.

Iris [A Fragment] engages with non-verbal being, through Swedish therapist Iris Johansson's experience as a non-verbal autistic child. Johansson's autistic perception (a term used by Erin Manning) have shaped her life-long 'art of communication' and her group therapeutic practice, Primary Work, which is the focus of Stidworthy's most recent work, Skydde (2026). In 2018 Stidworthy spent time with Johansson in Fagersta, Sweden and Dahab, Egypt, where Johansson lives and works, to develop the installation and screen versions of Iris [A Fragment].

At the age of twelve Iris began to use words communicatively, and developed a passionate commitment to connect with people in what she called the ‘ordinary reality’, instead of escaping ‘out’ to the ‘real reality’. Iris [A Fragment] hinges on the key moment that triggered this development into language and social relationship. Realising she had no sense of herself as a person, a subject, Iris’ father placed her in front of a mirror. What she saw was not her own reflection, but a terrifying black hole ‘like a swirling typhoon, or the pupil in the eye’.

In its installation and film forms Iris [A Fragment] evokes a slow process of learning to see and understand the sensation of being as a human subject, “… even if could not see myself as an ‘I’”.