In this experimental film work, The Diamond (Descartes' Daughter) (2008), there exists a narrative of sorts that emerges from the artist’s own experience of remembering a scene in a film. Wardill relates this to the apocryphal anecdote relating to the famous French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) and the story of the death of Descartes’ daughter. She uses this myth as a metaphor for her own search. The words are delivered in a mechanical sounding Swedish accent and seem to shatter like a crystal refracting light - the text breaks: sentence fragments are repeated, amended, the voice skipping as though trying to jump a programming error. This disconcerting narrative runs alongside a visual play - in a thick black visual field, in which a diamond is protected by lasers, images appear of a girl playing on a Nintendo Wii. She wears a leotard marked with tape - a homemade version of the costume that Eitienne Jules Marey would dress his subjects in when conducting chromophotography, through logic experiments. Meanwhile, multidirectional glints of the diamond produce shards of white light against the total ink-black darkness.
