Place

My new film is finally finished!

An opportunity swiftly followed that would allow the work to be developed further so I spent most of last week working on the application. The first thing to tackle was the context – what I say about the work – which was in dire need of overhaul. What seems to work for me is to write a quick draft, pare this back to key points and then rearrange into some kind of logical order. The goal is to connect honestly with what the work’s about so the pressure is to challenge content and dump superfluous waffle. Generalisations were removed; any sweeping statements or obscure references were replaced by specifics expanding on what the particular concept meant for the work itself. This was a useful exercise as it challenged my own understanding and several things altered as a result.

The whole process took about five days. I spent a bit of time each morning revisiting what I’d written with fresh eyes, repeating this until the amendments petered out and the text finally felt right.

Link to an extract of the film

More about my work: my website – twitter feed

My other blog: inspiration

I heard a talk by artist Donna Fleming recently which made a few key things fall into place. She talked about how crucial it is to follow what feels exciting in one’s work rather than worrying about what you THINK you should be doing or listening to the voices of doubt in your head that warn you that it simply isn’t good enough.

What I took away from the session was:

• Follow what feels exciting in what you make, no matter how simple. You might find yourself fascinated for example as I am by something as banal as reflection – the feeling one thing is intruding into another.
• Follow this through into other things that snag your attention – images, written texts, TV programmes, doodles made in an idle moment, etc.
• Donna suggests everything is connected. Once you know what you’re drawn to, look for the common thread connecting them all – likely to be illuminating as to what your work is really about.
• Don’t stress about pinning down the wider context / reasons for why you make what you do – it crushes creativity. Obviously, eventually one has to pin this stuff down for statements, etc., but keep it to a minimum.
• Make as much work as you can – ideally every day. Watch out for procrastination and avoidance tactics though – the things used to avoid the fear of making!

More about my work: my website – twitter feed

My other blogs: project survey – the alternative gallery – inspiration

I’ve been trying to make a revised version of my film since the New Year using new footage shot, but with no success. On the point of abandoning the project as a lost cause, three ideas suddenly free things up. I find these inspiring pieces of work by Kathleen Herbert and Antoine Cordet and a conversation with a friend reminds me of another piece of work I saw in the summer by Yuri Pattison.

A shift in mind-set, seemingly subtle, but crucial to me; I’m making a collage NOT a film, even if I am using film techniques!

Start again.

Simplify, so restrict things to a few techniques – cropping, simplification of colours, unexpected transitions. The footage falls into natural groups – landscape, architecture, speeding colours – and it feels apt to use different techniques for each to emphasise their specific characteristics. This new approach feels rather like painting – with the computer rather than a brush!

I realise it’s essential to organise the footage well – invaluable when you need to find something later.

Now I’m at the point where I have my clips and know the approaches I want to use. But arranging the material into a final cut is another thing. What seems to work is reflecting on the next possible move before making a decision and actioning it in Adobe Premier. The process feels more like a considered game of chess than a race to get to the finishing line, but something interesting does seem to be emerging.

Longer term, I think the film footage can be used to make real, physical collages that condense multiple shots into a single picture, perhaps taking inspiration from Cordet to obscure sections of the image with paint before drawing in new definitions.

More about my work: my website – twitter feed

My other blogs: project survey – the alternative gallery – inspiration

There is a discontinuity between me as spectator-traveller and the space of the landscape I journey through that stops me seeing sites as places or from being fully present in them, even when I try tactics to bridge the gap.

I’ve surveyed my entire journey and am now focusing on seven places that feel important. I don’t know the names of these places, their purpose, or even precisely where they are. I could find out but I don’t want to – it seems irrelevant. Failing to name them has some benefit; it blocks the law of the ‘Other’ from gaining entry, impeding their drift towards non-place. I feel them as a kind of abstraction; a construction largely of my own imagination to be recorded, documented, captured, and visually explored.

Rather than making a film of the journey as a whole, I’m going to focus on a site at a time, using each to explore different characteristics of film, image or the mobile phone camera.

The train creates dual movement – the physical momentum of my own body during the journey and also the parallel motion of the landscape rushing past. I catch views in partial glimpses – a series of snapshots piled hurriedly into my memory – which are re-composed in the account I later give of them. Augé suggests such re-telling tends to lean towards ‘prophetic evocations of spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really make any sense; spaces in which solitude is experienced as an overburdening or emptying of individuality, in which only the movement of the fleeting images enables the observer to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse the possibility of a future.’

I am confronted with a landscape I ‘ought to contemplate, cannot avoid contemplating’ and I derive ‘a rare and sometimes melancholy pleasure’ from my awareness of this responsibility.

The train is an ideal vantage point from which to see. It offers movement but maintains distance – separation. The landscape vanishes; ‘soon it is only a shadow, a rumour, a noise. This abolition of place is also the consummation of the journey, the traveller’s last pose’.

Reference: Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe, 2nd ed., (London: Verso, 2008 [Non-Lieux, Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite, 1992]). 1st ed. published 1995, pp.68:72, p.77

More about my work: my website – twitter feed

My other blogs: project survey – the alternative gallery – inspiration