Lisa Corrin: In 1997, you showed me sculpture that took as its theme motherhood, including pregnancy and birth. Around that time you had made your video "Jackanory". How did you move from making objects to making video works? Did it have something to do with an interest in narrative?

Maria Marshall: When I was making objects, my work related to my two sons. During my first pregnancy I built a pod that took me the entire duration of the gestation to complete, so one could consider it a kind of time-based work. During the second pregnancy I curated an exhibition called "Two Seconds Nine Months". I got to know the work of my contemporaries such as Damien Hirst and I discovered that I could actually change media if I wanted to. During the same pregnancy I kept a diary and that is how I began incorporating storytelling in my work. The diary became a work in itself. From there I just picked up a video camera and put the footage together with me narrating the story, picking up on particular parallels within storytelling and real life.

The construction of a narrative, however, is a combination of your script and also visual decisions such as camera angle, editing, manipulating the speed of the image such as the use of slow motion and also decisions about whether to use black and white or colour. Some of your work has an almost sepia tone giving it the texture and tone of memory or an old photograph. How did you arrive at the very specific language of video making that's come to be associated with your work?

Fundamentally I was a sculptor. I worked with three-dimensional space. What I learned from the language of sculpture is that something has to grow from something else. I also read psychoanalytic and film theory. Jacques Lacan was particularly meaningful to me. I took these tools into filmmaking.

When I make a video that is black and white and very grainy, it connects the images to memory. "Mister, can my go home now?" which I shot on Super 8, is particularly grainy stock and it "reads" like a newspaper clipping that is slightly out of focus. The video plays on a mother's fear of having her child stolen.

The child in the film looks as though it is fading before our eyes. The quality of Super 8 intensifies that fear of loss. It also makes it a very tough film to watch. The child's voice also goes from sounding normal to going slower and slower, deeper and deeper until it sounds exaggerated and unnatural, and not human anymore. The image and the voice dissolve into nothingness. Many of your works deal with memory.

"Sticks, Flames, Smoke, Cheering" is also about memory, this time referring to war. It is set on a beach. There are three separate scenes: a beach scene, a water scene and a scene in which a smiling boy is being covered up with sand. I was thinking about those landings of the allies on the beachheads. I am Jewish, and I always think about what my children or I could have gone through.

You have said that mainstream film has had more influence on your art than the work of other contemporary video artists.

I am influenced by Hitchcock, Scorcese, Kubrick, De Palma, Polanski. Polanski's "Chinatown" is a lean film. There is nothing extraneous in it. Within my work there is no room for any details. Each video is very pared down. The pieces get their seductive power from their leanness.

That leanness is much more annunciated because of the use of repetition. Your videos are extremely short and they run on a continuous loop. Sometimes one loop only lasts for thirty seconds or a minute. I think the way they gain power over the viewer is that when he or she is sitting in the room and sees the same loop over and over and over it gets so far under his or her skin that the viewer is hypnotized.

Your video works are highly constructed. Nothing is left to chance. You have plotted every inch of footage, every detail, how it's going to sound, what kind of texture you want. You may work intuitively but your delivery system is very precise.

My work is very constructed, and I have learned a great deal from filmmakers in this regard. "Chinatown" is, arguably, among the best screenplays ever written. There's a scene in which the detective, played by Jack Nicholson, slaps Faye Dunaway. Dunaway has been sexually abused by her father which results in producing a daughter. Nicholson slaps Dunaway on one cheek and he asks, "Who is she?" and she responds, "Sister" and he slaps her on the other cheek and she says, "Daughter" and then he slaps her again and she says, "Sister" and then he slaps her again and she says, "Daughter". Then it sinks in. With Nicholson the viewer begins asking "how can this person upstairs be the sister and the daughter?" If the father had sexually abused Dunaway and she had his child it would be both her sister and her daughter. There are masterful narrative sequences like this within cinema that I hone in on. I also look for very clean visual information. The language of film is full to the brim of seduction. I like beauty and I like to draw in the viewer; so I get very moved by certain sequences.

Polanski's work is loaded with erotic undertones. He finds the sexual tension even in the most anodyne details. This is a defining aspect of your work that is made more complicated by the fact that the main subject is almost always children. You use your own children in your work. Your son Jake, in particular, appears frequently. He is an exceptionally beautiful child. It is almost painful to look at him. Because of his age, he's neither male nor female, but a genderless putti. However, when he eats the oyster in "Put medication in his pocket," it is impossible for an adult not to think about oysters as supposed aphrodisiacs. Here is an innocent child just sucking down an oyster, but we, as adults, project a grown-up sexuality on his action.

It is risky business for a woman artist to "use" her children in her work let alone to represent them so sensually. The erotic life of children is the ultimate taboo subject, especially in Britain where paedophilia is a cultural preoccupation.

In this country they put sexuality and sensuality in the cupboard. Adults don't understand or don't want to understand or relate this to children. But, children have an innate sexuality that is constantly evolving. Lacan writes eloquently about it. He refers to their development in three stages. First there is the Oedipus Complex - they want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. Within a healthy environment they get over this stage of their development during the mirror phase. This is the equivalent of putting a mirror in front of a child in order for them to realise that they are themselves, rather than a part of their mothers. In the third stage they fully individuate and develop an awareness of an independent sexual self.

But my acceptance of my children's sexuality does not mean I refer to it explicitly or physically. I don't show my children's genitalia in my work. That is not the kind of seduction in which I am interested.

It is true that my son Jake has an amazing film presence. He just holds people's attention. In photographs he doesn't do it at all, and in real life he does it even less. In working together on these films I believe I am creating a healthy environment for him to go through these different stages of development. If you squash a child's sexuality as it develops they are going to be screwed up. Raphael on the other hand reminds me of an actor from the 1940s. His face bears an extraordinary stillness. Photographed, Raphael has an intoxicating presence. Understanding your children is empowering and with that knowledge of their insides and exterior you can teach them about their strengths.

Your images are distinctly different than those created by other artists who have made their children their subject such as Sally Mann, Tierney Gearson and Mary Kelly. Such images of children in a public, art world context have become loaded. Kelly's work actually doesn't show the child at all, but infers the presence of its body through its relationship to that of its mother's body. Tierney Gearson is, of course, an American photographer who this year achieved some notoriety in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. Apparently some people took issue with her photographs such as the one of her child peeing while wearing a mask. Sally Mann has been criticised for invading the privacy of their children when she captures on film her pre-adolescent daughters lying nude in hammocks.

What kind of conversations have you had with your children to help them understand the nature of what you're trying to do and how would you respond to criticism that the work could in any way be exploitative, even though you're not showing them in the nude? You expose vulnerable sides of them. It is conceivable that in twenty years they will feel you had invaded the private space of their childhood and shared it with the public.

I show them the films and so they're very aware of what I do as an artist. I try to make an environment during that filming process that is entirely unthreatening to them, even though the results for adult viewers may be unnerving. "Don't let the T-Rex get the children", is one of the toughest to watch for many people. In this film Jake appears in an emerald green straight jacket with his head shaved. We built a padded a cell made of velvet in which the front was removed and we shot from above. It was about ten feet high. It took us longer to shave Jake's head than it did for us to shoot the footage. If Jake didn't want his head shaved I wasn't going to do it. We had a comedian on the set. He is the father of four children. It was a careful, entertaining process and Jake reveled in the attention. The comedian was on top of the padded cell and he was making Jake laugh so he felt completely at home and that's what is captured on the footage.

You wouldn't know when you see that film that there's a comedian sitting on top, in fact, you don't know from the expression on Jake's face whether he's laughing or whether he's gone mad. It's extremely menacing and very ambivalent. There's a moment when the camera zooms away and then returns so that his face swallows the screen and seems very close to the viewers own. The viewer is looking into the face of the utterly unfathomable. It is deeply disturbing because it seems to be laughing at you. We don't know whether to be disturbed or whether to laugh back. It is not only ambiguity but also a deep ambivalence that characterises the mood of your films. I am thinking of "I love you Mummy, I hate you". That could be more ambivalent? It reminds me of Gillan Wearing's video "Sascha and Mom."

You seem to have a rather extraordinary ability to resurrect your own childhood feelings. But you also show us these feels simultaneously from the point of view of the anxious adult who sees these complicated emotions coming out of their children. Many of your works play into parental anxieties. One of the most frightening to me is the piece with your son under water in the bathtub, where you don't know whether he's drowning or whether he's in the womb. It is called, "I did like being born, I put my wings open, then I flied". It is both comforting and utterly horrifying. In another work, "Building Blocks" the camera slowly slides up a brick wall. The analogue sound has reached its deafening climax. The film crackles like an old home movie and then for a split second you see an image standing on top of a wall. It is like a dream in which you are trying to relate something to someone that you distantly remember but are not quite sure if you really saw it or you're projecting it. Who is standing on the wall? Is the child going to fall? Was that child really there? Maybe it wasn't a child. Who could it have been?

I purposely try to create confusion, to muddle the boundaries. In "When I grow up I want to be a cooker" there are three seductive shots that are repeated. Over eighteen seconds, the smoke is built up until you can't see the boy anymore but the sequence is actually impossible. The child cannot logically be doing what the film suggests. You're thinking "what is going on?" So we know the film is a fantasy made in an editing booth but we are pulled right in. I try to make films that go directly to the psyche, that probe it and manipulate it. This film was made on the back of a prototype for an anti pollution ad. The director Laurie Castelli was looking for a baby to appear to be smoking. Jake was suggested by a mutual friend. Laurie generously allowed me to use six seconds of his footage and then organized a visit into Flame to build the smoke up.

The titles of your pieces are also opaque and this leaves interpreting them very open-ended.

The titles are often personal and generally come from my children. I have a little notebook and I write down what they say. I do a lot of listening, not just for titles. I am fascinated by the way they speak and act, or the way that they want to invade your space and just be attached to you, or how they define their boundaries and also try and cross the line all the time. It was Jake who said, "when I grow up I want to be a cooker" when he was two. What he meant was that when he grew up he wanted to be a cook.

Is there a relationship between the use of such a spontaneous statement by your child and the images in the films?

Many of my films come from my own paranoia and the difference between what I fear and what is real. I had post-natal depression and during that terrible period I was constantly worried someone was waiting to snatch my child away from me. "When I grow up I want to be a cooker", is related to my paranoia. Jake was only two and I was projecting on him a future as an addict - he could be addicted to anything, drugs, alcohol, chain-smoking. How can a mother control these things? I was afraid of what would become of him. How does a mother calm herself and learn to let her children just be. When I say to him, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and he says "a cooker" I am projecting on to him what I fear he may become as opposed to what he thinks he may become.

Perhaps your most beautiful title is, "I did like being born, I put my wings open, then I flied". I would love to hear the story behind that piece.

It was filmed in a bathtub. It had to be done twice. There was very little footage to work with in the end so most of what you see is a serious editing job. To keep the image appearing like the child was under the water, I used very jagged edits and I created the sound of a storm at sea as though a boat was going backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards. And then the child floats when there's silence and he looks so peaceful like Ophelia in the famous painting by the British Victorian artist Millais. The title was Jake's explanation of how he understood being born. The things that the boys say sometimes could make you weep.

Can you tell me about "President Bill Clinton, Memphis, November 13, 1993", in which you include a speech by former U.S. President Bill?

This film depicts my children opening one hundred presents. They have so many toys I'm ashamed. They play with them once and then they break them or they just leave them. Raphael delivers the speech. I work in America a great deal and follow American politics. I was fascinated by the "outing" of Clinton, the humanising of the president by the exposure of his affair with Monica Lewinski in such graphic detail, how he lied and how he attempted to redeem himself by talking to religious leaders and apologizing. I did quite a bit of research on Clinton and his speeches. I set the film in a house that was like the White House with the sun streaming in. The entire film is framed like a postcard with this perfect, utopian light that was created through special effects. In the film the kids open one hundred presents and then the room empties again. I reversed it, so that in the end there's only one child standing there.

The speech you chose is about what Americans believe is the ideal society and it asks, "who is going to look after the children" in this cock-eyed moral land of too much plenty? The speech, like Christmas, lulls us into a false sense of security. The First Family as Americans refer to their President and his family, is guardian of the entire American family, that is the nation - its uber-parents. One of the things that your piece reveals, I think rather trenchantly, is that something that appears so ideal has been tarnished. The system has no stability or moral core despite the fact that the speech is entirely about morality. The whole system has gone out of control. When you speed up the film there's a kind of frenetic quality to the children's actions. They are almost psychotic, going crazy opening up these boxes.

When children open up presents they are psychotic.

"Once upon", set in a schoolyard is also very political. You take the story of the "Three Little Pigs" and suddenly, the wolves are the good boys and the sweet little pig turns out to be the bad guy who blows everything up in the end. There is a reversal of the roles within the children's story. A fairytale is supposed to tell the story of good and evil and have the "right" people come out on top. But you do something very, very disconcerting. You juxtapose this reversed fairytale with children coming in and out of a playground. What nasty places schoolyards are! They are where the battles over cultural value systems start taking place. We think of children as innocent and yet there are a lot of things that go on between them in the schoolyard that is anything but innocent. That's where they begin to impose social hierarchies and commit injustices, the same social injustices that dominate the adult world. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the making of that piece and the politics, the personal politics that are behind it.

Children have to learn how to be adults. The schoolyard is where they act out adult roles. In the grown-up world it is often hard to say who is the good guy and who is the bad guy because the good guy doesn't always behave the way we expect him to behave. Look at what is happening in Israel at the moment. The Palestinians bomb the Israelis and then they bomb them back and it goes on an on. Who is right? Who is wrong? Never trust the way things appear.

The order of things is always subject to change. How do you teach that to your children when it is so much easier to think in black and white?

I am trying to bring up my children to ask questions and to deal with the complex answers.

This past year you made a video, but for the first time used yourself. You refer to it as the visitation, though it's really called, "When are we there?" Can you talk about the title of that piece and why you decided to use your own body in this work?

Whenever we are in the car the kids say, "When are we there? When are we there?" In this piece due to the loop we never arrive, so the question becomes redundant. The violation is therefore repeated.

The opening tracking shot comes straight from Kubrick's "The Shining" when the little boy is on the bicycle. You see everything from that kid's view, coming down that corridor and you're just terrified of what's going to be lurking around the other side of the wall. Jane and Louise Wilson have also been very influenced by this signature sequence in Kubrick's film. In your piece the doors begin to open and the camera moves through this corridor and suddenly there is an abrupt turn and we wind up in a room with you. The shot creates tremendous suspense. What happens next is uncanny.

I am standing there, not blinking, like a cut out object. The camera looks at my feet and there's actually something happening under the skin, as if someone could be touching my legs, perhaps the male gaze, touching my dress, touching my arms, touching my neck, but there are only indentations in the skin to suggest this. Then the shot goes out of the window and comes back through the skylight up the stairs and down this corridor again. On the third time around the suspense increases even further. Alternatively the activity could be interpreted as coming from the woman. When I was pregnant, it felt like a violation. I was impregnated, visited by a child inside me that was growing and hungry and needy and making me feel awful emotional swings.

The basis of the narrative is the New Testament story of the Annunciation of the Virgin in which the Holy Spirit comes to tell her that she is going to be the mother of Jesus. In so many of Gothic altarpieces you have the sinewy figure of the recoiling Virgin who has a look that is often both startled and compliant with what has been visited upon her. Does the piece allude to this iconography?

I think that it's very relevant but the piece is also inseparable from my experiences with my children. My experiences with motherhood have sometimes been frightening or threatening.

You use the words "frightening" and "threatening" very frequently in talking about the world and in talking about your work. Do you think that has something to do also with being a mother? That one becomes much more acutely aware of all the possible things that could happen? Do you find that you live in a constant state of fear about your children's wellbeing?

I absolutely do but I also give them a lot of freedom. I can give them this freedom because I deal directly with my anxieties in my work. I say, "right, you can have the strength and the possibility to go out in the world and do something." The work empowers me and calms me and enables me to empower and calm them.

In your recent work, "Playground", you also use child's play, in this case as a vehicle for the expression of children's pent-up anger, frustration or the need to react against convention.

The title, "Playground", immediately situates us in a child's social environment. It is a piece about teenage angst and the impulse to reject established ways of thinking. "Who is God?" is a question that my children ask in many guises. They will be teenagers before I know it. The church shakes with the force of the child's aggression as the ball hits the wall but the building does not budge. Its roots are deeply embedded in the bedrock of the social structure. The piece is also about football. The ball, the need to find an outlet for these feelings, is always present, inferred by it's shadow and his movements. Then there is the question of religion - the domain of spiritual control - and football - the domain of social control and how they fight it out for the attention of the boy, for a place inside his values. I have boys so this is a natural terrain for me to explore.

What would you like your children to understand about you and about your work when they get older? Because there's no question in my mind that there's an attempt in this work to communicate with them at the most profound level. It is so hard for parents and children to admit to one other how much is really going on beneath the surface. What is the legacy that you are hoping to leave your children through the works of art you've made?

I want my children to be themselves. I want them to have the courage to do whatever they want to do and to do it really well and not to look back. Somehow, I hope my work will show them that I have had the courage to live my life despite the complexity of what I feel and what I understand.

London, June 2001

© Kunstverein Freiburg e.V and the authors