Collaboration

http://www.vimeo.com/17758125
This is a revisitation of work from my MA in collaboration with Hutch Demouilpied, sound artist and composer.
I found on the MA that my ideas had suddenly become quite clear, in doing my dissertation. I was really interested in the possibilities for fragmenting narrative, either in sound or in print.
However, in returning to my practice, the narrative I was working with had come from a young woman with incurable cancer. I found it very hard to listen to her experience objectively, and to edit out a lot of what she was talking about. The work then became driven by the need to find various ways of telling her story, rather than by the ideas I had developed in the dissertation.
I think I had become too immersed in the work. I did attempt to edit into the sound track various fragments of her speech, but these proved unsuccessful and this was abandoned in favour of simply letting her tell her story. My editing therefore was to provide the edited highlights of this story and provide smooth links between aspects of the story.

I found this frustrating, and turned to a colleague for help. Hutch had suggested the idea of collaboration, so I gave her the audio, and discussed the ideas and difficulties I had had with the narrative.
She then brought her ideas to the project, making very different edits and completely fragmenting the narrative. She sought to make a sonic world in which narrative fragments would float in and out.
She clearly avoided the telling of traumatic stories, but layered the traumatic elements into a multilayered sonic world which hinted at more universal elements of loss, pain, life changing events, and coming to terms with the impact of illness.
Once we had agreed the sound edits, I re-edited the visuals and we agreed these.

It was such a great experience to collaborate on a project like this, to learn from Hutch's take on the narrative, and to refine my own ideas about narrative. I also was pleased that I was able to create a visually fantastical world which could be inside the body but at the same time was not, a mysterious place of otherness. This is a quality I hope to maintain and develop in future work.
So I need now to think and plan some future work, and find some studio time!

MA work and thinking

Stills from "This World is so Beautiful" video projection 

My MA show piece was a video projection entitled "This World is so Beautiful"
It was based on narrative recorded at St Josephs hospice in East London. The narrator is a young woman talking about her experience of diagnosis and treatments for cancer in her brain.
My imagery sought to draw on her descriptions of medical investigations and to capture the medical objective viewpoint. I wanted to create a tension between the objective "beauty" of the internal landscape of the body, and the narrator's description of the devastating impact of the illness on her life.
During the MA I felt more and more that my art practice needs to have some kind of community engagement, in fact it emerges from engagement with people, from their stories and narratives.
I now feel I need to actively seek out these community engagement situations to develop my practice further.                                                                  

           Whilst on the MA, I developed an interest in  storytelling as a means of portraiture, as a means of making sense of our encounters with another, and thereby of our own selves. I continue to be interested in the possibilities of fragmenting text and sound, alongside a more narrative component to my work.

Thoughts

This is an open journal where I can show my work, and discuss the ideas behind my work.
I am currently finishing off my MA at Wimbledon. This next three months are going to be really busy. I'm in the process of writing my dissertation, creating a professional portfolio and of course making some work that justifies and pulls together all the core concerns of my practice.
I'm interested in how we encounter another person, and the potential for others to provide us with a springboard into knowledge about ourselves. I use narrative recorded from people, as sound or text within video, or installation based work, and have started to work with printing processes.
I am a maker of objects and videos. My objects, and the processes involved in making them often appear in my videos as imaginary landscapes or ambiguous images that reflect on the form and content of a narrative.