Sketchbook episode 1
This film is the first pages of a sketchbook.
A drawing, a thought or a scribble in the margin of a page that helps me remember an idea or a way to work technically with images. It is an interlude or a pause between working directly with footage from the main project of Lisa, my grandmother and Molly. Little sketches as ideas that may or may not be worth developing at a later stage. It is laying bare visually the thought processes and physical attempts to get closer to a form or a poetics of how I want to work with the film material for ‘4 Generations of Women’.
My sketchbook will be film, movement, sound, photography and drawings. It will also be personal accounts, academic reflections and quotes.
A drawing, a thought or a scribble in the margin of a page that helps me remember an idea or a way to work technically with images. It is an interlude or a pause between working directly with footage from the main project of Lisa, my grandmother and Molly. Little sketches as ideas that may or may not be worth developing at a later stage. It is laying bare visually the thought processes and physical attempts to get closer to a form or a poetics of how I want to work with the film material for ‘4 Generations of Women’.
My sketchbook will be film, movement, sound, photography and drawings. It will also be personal accounts, academic reflections and quotes.
I find such relief in not being precious about publishing this material. The point for me is to upload and post without thinking about value for me or anyone else. What happens for me in the moment of letting go and allowing failure to happen? As Barbara Bolt describes in one of my quotes in the film, it is material thinking.
This platform is intended to make process visible and to build an archive of these processes.
This platform is intended to make process visible and to build an archive of these processes.
Full quotes from the texts used in the film:
Practice as Research – Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (2007) Edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt ‘I would agree with Carter that it is in the joining of hand, eye and mind that material thinking occurs, but it is necessarily in relation to the materials and processes of practice, rather than through the “talk”, that we can understand the nature of material thinking. Words may allow us to articulate and communicate the realisations that happen through material thinking, but as a mode of thought, material thinking involves a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the intelligence of materials and processes in practice. Material thinking is the logic of practice.’ ‘…we come to know the world theoretically only after we have come to understand it through handling. Thus the new can be seen to emerge in the involvement with materials, methods, tools and ideas of practice. It is not just the representation of an already formed idea nor is it achieved through conscious attempts to be original.’ ‘However, we can not consciously seek the new, since by definition the new can not be known in advance. Hockney did not set out to find the new, but the new arrived to confront him. The “shock of the new” is thus a particular understanding that is realised through our dealings with the tools and materials of production and in our handling of ideas, rather than a self-conscious attempt at transgression. This is material thinking.’ |
Using the Sky (2016) By Deborah Hay ‘What if this theatre is the laboratory and your body is the site where the experiment takes place within the laboratory? What if the question is the material used in the experiment? In order for the experiment to continue it needs the material to support it. Your work as the dancer is to notice the experiment unfolding; how the arousal stimulated by the question changes and informs you.’ |
Barbara Bolt in the Chapter
The Magic is in Handling p. 30 |
Deborah Hay
Using the Sky p. 31 |
Sketchbook episode 2
These images of artwork inspire my work on 4 generations of Women
I encountered these two artworks –collage of photos by Ana Casas Broda and photo by Janine Antoni– at the Photographer's Gallery in London in 2013 for the exhibition Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity. I went to see it because I was creating my first film In becoming about my pregnant body. I was 7 months pregnant with my first baby. I remember being overwhelmed with how visceral the images were. It was emotional to see the portrayal of motherhood and pregnancy so upfront and without filter. It inspired me to be honest in my work.
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Earlier in 2021 I came across the work of Karolina Ćwik in the newspaper article 'I'd like to lock myself in a room.' Just the headline resonated so much with how I feel and the photographs looked uncannily familiar to my own home situations. And I couldn't decide whether the photos are constructed or taken in the actual situation. It makes me consider motherhood as this performative act where I can never tell to what degree I or my kids are performing a situation of mother/child. |
Barbara Hammer (a still from the film Vever (2019)) and Chantal Akerman (a still from No Home Movie (2015)) –both female experimental filmmakers – have become inspirations in my filmwork about motherhood and women. Akerman's use of long takes dwelling on an empty room with little action and her terms 'mothercamera'. Hammer's experimental and handheld use of the camera as an extension of herself and how she collaborates with other's, leaving her film material to be edited by other filmmakers. |
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In 2017-2018 I collaborated with lecturer in physical theatre Maria Kapsali at University of Leeds on the project Two Trainers Prepare. As part of this yearlong exchange of tasks in creative practices and our yoga practices I responded to one of her tasks by creating the image on the left 'Yoga with Iron'. The photo came about inspired by the work of Julie Blackmon (on the right) who makes surreal set-ups in everyday surroundings for her photographic art. I remember making a connection with Blackmon's aesthetics and seeing an opportunity to make art from that which surrounds me.
'Thinking through form' by Elisabeth Brun combines an essay film with a structural experiment. She uses camera positions and movements to explore 'place' in a formalised way. Brun's film as a way of using parameters or 'algorithms' is very much in line with my own play with form and experimental filmwork.
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Hannah Buckley is a female dance artists working across the disciplines of choreography and film on the topic of generations. In her work 'We Are Now' (2015) Buckley's explores the tender space between what it means to be an artist while caring for another person.
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