Still from the video Hell in the Sand 2015
Visual thinkers can just click on the link if preferred – but there is a vertigo warning with this video. Those who like words, do click the link but also feel free to read on.
HELL IN THE SAND 2015
Okay, it’s time to confess to something of a major obsession with iMovie. I notice that often this word is used pejoratively, sometimes jokingly or self mockingly even. That I must ‘confess’ at all suggests obsessions are something worth hiding, perhaps for fear of judgement.
For to become obsessed is indeed, I think, considered unhealthy if not unhinged, and a sign that one has lost control. Having a grip on oneself and on life are what we are taught to strive for – and yet ‘obsessions’ are precisely what drive my artistic practice and allow me to push into new areas of exploration, and in the process I find the motivation to develop new skill sets. Skills which might otherwise be impossible for me to acquire due to SpLD (Specific Learning Disability). And when I’m learning in this way I go full out. No half measures, no off switch. I have to push through until the creative process has played out, until I have reached saturation point and can step back (albeit temporarily and until the next bout of inspiration strikes).
So engaged am I with my project as a rule, that it only takes a new idea or technique/format such as iMovie to turn the switch to full power. So let’s call this kind of obsessive activity what it is – a learning style. Simple.
Let’s rewind then and begin again. This month I have been learning how to use iMovie. My output has been pretty high, creating videos with new photos and trawling my archive to bring to life the early moments and origins of my two year project. The result is a YouTube channel which has ignited after laying dormant for a year or so and a website homepage cluttered with video links (note to self – tidy homepage!)
I’m learning all the time with iMovie – my ability to conjure extreme focus when engaged in creative practice allows me to think a little bit more like a video-maker with each short film I make. The template is intuitive and easy to manipulate once you get the hang, and the possibilities for visual narrative seem to me (at this early stage) expansive.
So I have moved swiftly from the need to ‘illustrate’ a visually imagined poem in which the poetic narrative was both visually told and verbally inserted (quite literally) to an understanding of the beauty and power of visual storytelling alone in this form. Quickly indeed (overnight it seemed) and by a happy technical accident using old iPhone captures and a default setting on iMovie, I reached an epiphany that brings you Hell in the Sand 2015. In which, the ken panning mode on auto allowed a second, what I will call vestibular, narrative to be told. Let me fill you in on the story.
The continual conflation of the 1939 Spanish exiles to England with the Basque Children of 1937 among the small (in national terms) circles of cognoscenti about this history continues to haunt and trouble me. At a conference only days ago I was told that my father’s exile story (and that of his compatriots) had been well researched and known about – as about fifteen years of study had been devoted entirely to it. This referred of course to the marvellous work of the Association of Basque Children ’37. It was not the first time that this confusion had arisen and I was able to untangle it in the Q&A session. But the conflation often remains (as my story is untold) and the implication remained at the conference that the Basque children’s story is well known when I am certain it is not (in national terms). Recovery of the national memory and our witness to these separate strands of our exile stories are so important. Otherwise the exiles of ’39 continue to be erased, surely.
And so it was a gift to be able to weave together the 1939 internment camp narrative I had worked on in February 2014 with the Basque Children’s sea sick rescue on the ship the Havana in May 1937. Thus I conflate and separate the two strands – detangling and entwining with each rock – moaning like a sea sick sailor with each lurch of dear old ken pan. I am also delighted to have made my first conceptual piece. Not documenting, not packaging, but immersing the viewer in the process of my studio assemblage through the window of a compelling, at once lulling and yet repelling vestibular experience. It’s more direct I feel.
But the warning on this video is serious. Through my prolonged viewing in the edit process I developed vertigo and wobbled around my house like the drunken sailor of the old song. In this sense I guess my obsession wasn’t so healthy – put me in the longboat until I’m sober…
