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!
