I've found myself with some unexpectec time to myself this morning, as the session I was supposed to have has been cancelled. This is the first day I've managed to come into uni since Easter – the term started on Monday, but I had to be in Shropshire for my nan's funeral, and though I planned to come in yesterday, I found myself completely exhausted, mentally and physically.
Though everything feels a little disjointed at the moment – it's been hard to connect with normality since my nan died so suddenly, and everything's been a bit up in the air. But I have been thinking of ideas for work, which is reassuring as I always feel a little insecure if no ideas come for a while. I've tried to find ways of generating them, but in reality I don't seem to feel satisfied by something I do unless it arrives in my head without being 'forced'. I don't see this as some kind of mythological process, just that if I think too hard about what direction I'm going to take, my thoughts seem to curl in on themselves and shrivel up, then my work becomes far too self-concious and feels awkward. But I've had an idea, to do with cocktail umbrellas, which I think will be the next in a series of short video works, some of which are on my Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/chinateacup
The are all connected in a way, though I don't want to force a connection. Broadly speaking, they all involve everyday objects and how I relate to them. In all of them, I've avoided directly showing either myself or any other humans, but one aspect that's occurred to me recently is that one is usually aware, when watching the videos, of an off-camera human presence (me) directing and manipulating events. This is particularly true in the most recent videos I've made, which explore the impact of one object on another, for example one shows eggs rolling on a surface, 'trying' to knock each other off. Another features balloons trying to 'make friends' with a cactus, with predictable results. I'm aware that in these works, there is the added element of outside control, or lack thereof; I'm setting the objects in motion, the objects performing in scenes I'm trying to direct. However, they don't always act as I expect them to, which I find quite entertaining. I'm in two minds as to whether to try and remove, to some degree, this direct human involvement; I've been thinking about trying the cactus scenario as a live-installation piece, in which the movements of the balloons are determined by an electric fan, which would be set up with a timer-plug, so that it would go on and off at different intervals. I plan to try this out, but I do wonder about how it will affect the work to remove myself from it in this way.
