So, after finally deciding on the writings that i want to give out (two different sets) and the size (A5), i have had continual problems with the paper. Constantly the gsm that i was asking for them to be printed on was too little, and so i had to go with a normal gsm paper. However, after printing some test pieces on white, it really just didn;t look right. The white was too garish and the type of writing just didn't sit well on this. My booklets look great on the off white/ slightly cream colour, so i have ended up using a similar colour to these. It ties the two pieces of writing together anyway. I went for a slightly lower gsm for these A5 writings, as i don't want the thickness of the paper to dictate some sort of preciousness to the writings. Rather, I want them to be something you can take away, and forgetfully store in your pocket.
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John Akomfrah, dayaaaam. I feel like this is all i can completely say with just how great this piece was. You go into this BIG black room, with soundproof pads on the walls. Sit down. In front of you are three large video screens, each playing something different, at times syncing up, and then back to different things. Yet the whole time they work beautifully together, they complement one another. The matter in hand here is the juxtaposition of placing whaling and the death of refuges trying to flee land across the sea. Just how cruel the sea can be and what has actually go on out there. How we as humans kill whales, polar bears just as easily as we kill other humans like the slave trade. However, before you go into some breakdown, you are presented with the fact whales killing seals, and there being this circle of life. And whilst you are watching these deaths and blood everywhere, on the screen next to it, you are being shown the beauties of the world. You're flying over a rain forrest, looks at HD snow covered trees where it is evident no one has been there or will ever destroy this. And then you are swimming along the great barrier reef and relishing in the wonders and you begin to enjoy the piece and forget about the other things happening. Like we often do as humans, we block the ugliness and things that don't affect us and only look on at what pleases us to see. And throughout this whole set up, sound reverberates through your body, so it doesn't matter if you are looking at the 'ugly' screen or the 'pretty' screen, you get an understanding of what is happening in both pieces through the constant torrent of sound. I think this is what i enjoyed the most. It was that the sound was always present and bringing you back into the moment. It didn't matter if you were looking away or leaving the room. It was present, and spoke with the film. I do not want my sound to be loud like this, but i want it to be a presence. A constant reminder of the place and situation. But it will be subtle and wont matter if it is missed, because it is a gentle lul bringing you back to the place.
I don't want the box that i am having for people to sit on to not seem inclusive, it can't be something that deters away from the rest of the set up and not flow. I have bought some laser cut wood that looks like the grills in the church on the floor/ also looks like what goes in a confession box, the slide in-between. I am going to put this in the front of the seat box to make the conversation of the piece flow more. I will place the speakers inside this box, either side. There is the question to be raised about the fact that then bird noises will be coming from below, however, i do not see this as a problem. The film is low down, i am talking of burials that happen in the ground. I believe this low placement fits well. Yet, I will soon see!
I have also been thinking about the box i am having with the turf on. I was thinking about the possibility of having a square of turf cut out in the middle, and having a stone placed there, that would then be what the paper sits on. These are my different options of what to have as a hand out in my studio. I think i'll probably go for this top one and have it cut in half and then alternate them in a pile.
Gondry's work is almost that of a childs perspective and outlook on life. All of his films have that certain direction taken to them. Some of his work is made from cardboard cuts out, shadow play - it has a homemade aesthetic to it, how a child would go about playing. In one of his films he is driving in a cardboard car in a cardboard world, it's dream like and there is an innocence to it. His work has autobiographical roots to it and because of this, there is something terribly nostalgic about watching his films. I suppose it could be questioned with his work, if this is his chance to reclaim his childhood, one that was lost. This type of work could perhaps be expected from someone who as a child had to be the adult of the family and grew up too fast, and now they need to repress back to how things were/ could have been.
Neoteny: is the retention of childlike attributes into adulthood. Childhood is a time free of judgement and a time where you don't have to be careful what you say or do, no editing over your actions or personality is needed. When watching Gondry's film work allows for chopping and changing, just like child's play, he makes the unreal and fictional real, again like a child's imagination. One of his most notable films "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" has camera screws in it where at times, the main protagonist is made to look as small as a child, Gondry sets up rooms at certain angles to allow for deception. He is also clever in this film with his specifically chosen sound. It helps show the dissolution of memories through its morphing into other things, and again using nostalgic sounds. I was reading through Samantha WIlliams Dissertation, entitled Forever 12: Recovering and Rejecting an 'inner child'. She found an interesting piece of writing which i found helpful in relation to my writings. ""While there may be a coherent plot, events do not unfold in any steady progression; rather, there are sudden changes in scenario, or scene shifts, which are sometimes baffling. Ordinarily logic is suspended. One can fly. People can turn into animals. We encounter people who have been dead for years, or improbably have converstations with film stars or royalty" (Empson 2002:71). I would like to note that children's fantasy play flows in a similar nature to the narratic of a dream, for example: jumping from one strong emotion to the next, moving through layers of narrative with rapid time and scene changes, reassembling past experiences to blend personal dialogue with fantasy and temporal mobility by means of flashbacks and flash forwards (Paley 2005)." My writings involve these sudden shifts, changes, but all the while, my film displays her to be lying still - hardly moving. When we look at adults, they seem to be following some sort of monotonus pattern, but perhaps, inside, their mind is still jumping around like a child and finding there inner child - but not that others would know or realise. Why does the adults inner child have to die? Or pretend to not exist? This fast pace world seems to hold the setting that in order to get anywhere, you need to be an adult. Children spend time wishing to be adults, and adults spend time wishing to reverse it all back. But i hope in my piece to bring these two together. The adult is lay dreaming/ dying, and writings tell of childhood fun where time sped and death collided with childhood. I managed to record the sound of my home church bells chiming at 12 o'clock and gained some sound of some birds and wind sounds (background noises). I have placed this together in a music piece where there are continual ambient sounds and then on the minute there is a single chime. Then when the piece reaches 12 minutes the bells fully chime twelve tolls. The piece seems to work as an accelerated time work, it alludes to the illusion of time speeding up, the notition that we are running out of time. I managed to clear the white noise out of the bird sound piece, and have made a sound piece to place alongside my film. I will have this playing softly in the background whilst my film plays.
So these are the two that i need to make a decision between. I feel like the top one sits in the background better than the one below. The top one has less colour than the bottom one, however, i still believe that this looks plausible to being an alive human. I feel like the colours of the one below are quite sickly, and in a too much way. I will leave the film for a bit, and come back to this colour decision.
I have refilled and now i'm currently trying to decide what hue i want her. I don't want her to look dead, but i also don't want her to be flushed pink with life. These were some of the different colours etc that i was trying out. When you really up the contrast key, there is an interesting blue hue that comes over the foot. However, i believe the top right one is working best. The reason for this is because of its orange ish shade to it, it gives life to the piece - preventing her from entering into death. Whereas the other ones with their blue ish colour transform her into a corpse, which is not what i am wanting from this work.
Taken from: http://www.arvopart.org/tintinnabulation.html
"Tintinnabulation is a word "which evokes the pealing of bells, the bells' complex but rich sonorous mass of overtones, the gradual unfolding of patterns implicit in the sound itself, and the idea of a sound that is simultaneously static and in flux." Pärt explains the term this way: Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises - and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. . . . The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation." I love this idea of the church bells being both static and flux. This is something i can easily relate to. They stop you in your tracks to a moment of deeper questioning, you become transfixed. But they also have the gift of bringing joy and memories that flood back into you. This notion proves how poignant bells are, that these great composers have sought after them and their structure to bring something unique and important to their work. Whilst in London I researched a few galleries that i could look round whilst i was there for the day. Heather Phillipson is currently Whitechapel Gallery's Writer in Residence. I decided to have a look at her work as i was interested in her poetry/ writings. Here current work here was about how both our physical and affective selves are constructed and how they might escape. This interested me the most as i am looking into this thought where the inner child in people is still there and how it can escape/ rise up. I want my 'her' to rise up, escape the boundaries that are placed on her by time. That she is able to live like a child that she still wants to be.
Phillipson's writings were casual. She tells you to listen to her in the booklet and places things in capitals. Sections of the book are numbered off and almost categorised. In the zine she also write about this certain type of music, and this mentioned music is then being played around you as you walk through the space. It is sensory full and captivating. I loved how the books were all piled up, there were masses and you could take one away. I really enjoyed this aspect. And even though there were so many aspects, they all bled into each other and sat perfectly in place. So this was the first one back since Easter break.
In a short amount of time we got things covered and i got confused with where to go next! I have decided that i will spend the rest of this time refining my film, to bring it to the standard i want. I need to really focus on the bells sound piece and figure out what i am doing for that. At the moment i am thinking of having them toll 12 times on the minute. But i don't know if that will be too much, however, i want them extremely quiet - so perhaps that won't be a problem. Ideally i need to practise the film being shown with the sound to see how it will all work, but as always, ALL of the installation rooms are booked up! Gillian suggested i also book out a plasma screen and a cube monitor, as i may want more than one film showing. Perhaps. However, i shall still get these out. We spoke about the drawing a presence exhibition up at the minute, each of the artists who submitted to this made a poster that was reproduced and that could be taken away by all of the people looking round the show. This intrigues me. Originally i was thinking that i could reproduce my booklets and make hundreds of these, but i could perhaps just make 8 crisp perfect ones of these and have them placed on the bench. Then on the side, on the way out, i could have a A4 stack of poster type things for people to take away. For this paper i'm thinking have them printed on bible paper. We rounded up the tutorial with the suggestion of me watching 'Six Feet Under' and 'The Witch', the latter looks terrifying and i don't think i'll be watching that! I wrote round the bottom of the room a piece taken out of my zine. It was a continuous line, and the film just touched on it. It was alright i suppose. The issue is just making sure all of the text looks the same. The other issue with this was that you couldn't read the text if the light was off, or you couldn't really see the film if the lights were on to read the text.
So i am still thinking about how to display my zines. I know that i want text work in my final piece, but i am currently unsure how to go about doing this. I have been thinking about, okay, what if i was not to have a zine now? What would i do instead? I thought about writing round the room. I'm going to try this out. I'm going to get some sellotape and put it round a whole room at the bottom and write bits from my zine onto this. I then want to place bits of acetate round the room as though i have written larger bits out. We will see how this goes.
So, after all that i decided to go with a portrait zine A6. It is made of thin tracing paper, folded in the middle and bound with simple thread in the middle. Simple but effective. The order of service style to it suites it well, i believe. It enables you to become a part of the piece, it is inclusive now. You know it is about her, but because you are included you can watch her and go on this journey with her. The grey colour of the writing allows it to not be too harsh or sharp on the eyes, it's gentle and faint. And therefore, you can easily read through to the other side, and it blends well. Again, here i went with single sided pages, so that the text is actually legible. the photos need to be faded more, but they work well being the whole size and just cropped, seeing as all of my work is shot landscape. Having this piece in my hands i see the importance of it needing to be bound if it is to be produced on this type of paper.
I'm not going to lie, the first zine i made was a rather shoddy attempt. I cared more about the content than what was inside. However, i have been trying out little mock up zines in order to see what type of binding i would like. I want to keep it the same size (A6) as it makes it seem like something precious, something that you can keep and look after, and ultimately something that you can always have on you. However, even though i preferred the zine landscape, i am changing this to be portrait. Order of services are traditionally portrait, i have never seen one landscape, and so i wanted to stick to this. Here are some the mock up zines i produced:
I therefore bound one that was page by page. As you can see from it being printed on tracing paper, this one worked better by being single paged. The grey colour worked well too as it wasn't too dominant, but i am just not too sure on the tracing paper.
I have added sections into my writing that make it seem more like an order of service, and actually, i really like this change. However, this has now meant that my zine will definitely need to be seen portrait as this is the way they always look. Another thing with this is that they are never bound. Ultimately, there are only two pieces making up their booklets. However, with mine, i have around 20 sheets of paper, and i just don't feel that slotting it all together will work?! ..But i am enjoying this new format to my zine and writings. My version: "Remain standing and cover ears And the bell rings loudly even though it is a normal day. Her dad needs to do some work in the church and she joins him for the journey. And there is a drain that travels around the church and it is fun to walk in and follow it around. It fills with leave in the autumn but has moss in it at the minute and hidden pincones. Her dad collects pinecones and puts them in the van. Look for pinecones for her dad A few are surveyed by her and collected. She keeps walking around and her dad is sat on a bench talking to an old woman. Her brown clothes drown her. She has a scalf round her head to keep her ears warm. They are laughing. She recognizes her. Together: Good afternoon The lady’s face is wrinkly, and in those wrinkles are dirt. And soil under her nails. Like mine. But she has pink lipstick on. Her nan doesn’t wear lipstick like this lady. She doesn’t know why Miss Phipps wears lipstick. It gets on her teeth. Her Dad told me she has a well down her garden and this is where she gets her water from to drink and wash. She doesn’t smell. I went and recorded the bells again today at my village church so that i had more material to work with.
Bring Back the Bells by Michael S. Rose This is a compelling article about the importance of church bells. They are a unifying force, something that preforms in celebration, mourning and warning. For anyone who has lived in a parish village, the bells are very important to their lives. It denotes a certain home feeling, the sound of comfort. To others though, they can seem something or an eerie nature, just prompting thoughts of death. Rose states that the bells draw people to the church, they act as a sort of homing device. (Perhaps this will draw people to my work). So i have been on ubu.web looking at some different zines as inspiration for my zine. There are so many different ones and so many different layouts!!!!! Here are just some examples of ones that provoked a reaction from me. So from left to right: I liked how this one is a familiar rhyme and they change simple parts of it to be spelt phonetically in the Scottish dialect. I enjoyed how personal this would be to someone and how you would then read it from their perspective. I was thinking that i could write my zines in more of a childlike manner to keep in with the theme of my writings. However, the only thing worrying here is that i want people to connect to my writings in their own way. I don't want my writings to be my thoughts and memories, i want my audience to believe that it could have happened to them, and it did in the past. So i might be able to spell some phrases like a child, but non that denote a certain region.
The second zine here: it comprises of hand drawn pieces. This is definitely not suitable for my work and i will continue to use screenshots from my films. They work well adding to the story and blending bits together. The zine on the right: Here it lists who is speaking, like a script. This is interesting. I don't think i would do mine in this same way as i don't want there to be a dialogue going on. However, i might list when she is talking: speaking out loud, thinking, shouting. I could also do movements, for example: stand up, breathing pauses. These certain bits could be in bold or italics - i think this is definitely the way forward. Moxhay works with imagined invented worlds. Working with old/new photographs (some taken from magazines), paint on canvas and digital manipulation, she creeates these enchanting eerie spaces/ photographs. On an initial viewing things can seem normal and fantastical, but when you start to really look into the work, you can see it's floors with logic. The work disrupts you. Shadows are not casted where they should be, the light sources from the windows do not correlate. The corners if the room either blend into straight patches, or merge into darkness, either way, they are not there. And finally, there is the messing of scale. Ultimately, there should be a little woodland in the middle of a room, but there is. I commend how Moxhay doesn't seem to be bothered with the deliberate misuse of different scales. I often worry about the size of a grass blade placed next to my model in my work. That the two will counteract each other and make it obvious that it's fake. These are pretty obvious that they are fake from day one. However, she runs with it and pushes it to the extreme. And still, everything within the work belongs and works side by side. She is not trying to fool you by doing it subtly, just show you plain and simple. I don't want my work to be some piece of trickery, I want it to just be. The viewer is able to know it's not real, and just be with it. I endeavour my films to hold this presence about them.
She has birds in the background taking over the main sound, flitting between spoken word and that. My writings won't be read out load, but i like the birds coming in loud then fading. The filming is so casual, normal and slightly glitchy. The homemade feeling to it adds comfort and connection to it. I often worry that my films are not up to some high tech specification, but this non perfect look adds something endearing to it. After i have made a film, i could add a post production 'wobble' to it, just slightly unsettle it. But there is a endearing beauty and care to this film, that i wish to achieve in mine. In some of her other works, she includes a rhythm of time, a beat. She keeps us in check with the progression of the film. I'm not sure that want a constant beat, but i like how in mine, there is the beating of time through the tolling of a bell at some points. There are also glitches in some of the background sounds she uses, things don't need to be perfect, it gets you out of the ideology that this will be a pretty perfect film. It also seems that repetition is key, and this in itself is unsettling. When does the piece begin and end, when are you free to leave it? Her sound work in "Garden Pieces" takes over the film, it almost detracts us from the images and over powers us. I was my sound to be in the distant and the film to be more of a main thing.
So i was trying to think of what size book. What book can relate to my work, and one that there can be masses of. And then i thought, I'm focussing on church bells, and why not look at the size of a hymn book. Use that size. There is always an order of service within these books. Things you say out loud with others. Sections where you listen and don't speak. And times when you know whether to sit or stand, and what music is being played.
This interests me.
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April 2016
Kerry FosterThird Year Fine Art Student at Falmouth School of Art. Fellow artists: |