I have within my practice made short films. In the past they have been a comment on the gaze. This series have been made in the past year and all are out takes from my day, incidental gazes, short captures when my focus has been drawn to an episode in the day. I have simply held the camera in my hand and held the focus on the space, sometimes whilst watching, sometimes whilst listening or engaging in some other activity such as online learning.
I write regularly and include poetry and lines of prose in my drawings. To make the 29 films in this series, I wrote 29 of these lines down and asked the editor to randomly apply these titles to the short films with no specific criteria. Within the treatment instructions I asked the editor to make all titles similar, adjust the levels of the sound so that there were no overly loud parts which can happen with in-field recordings. I asked the editor to keep the length of each film more or less to the original taking off any obvious shake at the start or end of the film. I wanted to keep the length of the gaze more or less true to my actual length of concentration during the original filming. I gave the editor a list of titles and asked him not to specifically assign any titles so there was no picking the titles to match the content. I wanted to see how universal the titles were, or if something happened to make the title applicable to the film.
I treated the series as a visual poem. It could be installed maybe as a poem in a series of monitors, or moving from one to another continually. I have for some time been trying to find a place for text within my visual work. The time spent in the home and away from the studio in 2020 has given me the opportunity to think more digitally and less physically because of restrictions. I do not want my practice to be overly changed by restrictions due to covid 19 but the place I have been and the means I have had available has enabled me to access a different visual process which has led to shooting, making, writing and finishing these films and bringing the text to the time based media in this way.
Finding a way to show the work has had its technical issues. I have resolved this through trial and error to show each film separately below, with a short explanation of the circumstance of the film being shot. Some of the films are naturally very quiet and the temptation is to try to fill with sound that wasn’t there. I have resisted temptation to mess around with these sound files for this project. The titles given do appear elsewhere in my work and on this blog. I have created a body of work in a series of sketchbooks which can be found here. These titles, phrases and words are deeply rooted in my ongoing work and have been with me sometimes my whole life.
I think I would like to make the film longer and have the images merge with the text working with the the images more. I was concerned about the length of the film and how this would be viewed only online at present and think this may have a better setting in a viewing place where the viewer may linger physically for longer.
Below you will find the whole series as one continuous viewable film. Below that you will find each film below its poem line title.
The white horse has been there since before she was born
Her heart lay in the midst of the secret
The space was flooded, and I drowned
She was engulfed and it grew around her
I’ll be free
The branches grew water and turned to ice
It was a lie, there was nothing above the clouds only ice and beauty
The earth grew over my body until it wasn’t visible, the pain didn’t stop though
I thought it was an installation, but it was just a cover
How many times did I walk this path?
The tree shaded my shame
The performance was set in stones
The clouds are where I dream, where you dwell inside me
I reached up and saw a ladder broken and cracked, it was the only way
He looked but he couldn’t see himself
He felt broken and unfixed
I kept falling down
The day before it didn’t even work
She has always been there, his heart in her body
She was watching over the grass he lay under
I found you on the ground, did you fall, did you fly?
She was engulfed and it grew around her
I needed to cement this in time
Descended through the hatch
The day before it didn’t even work
Each time I awake it was from another journey
I had a moment where I told the truth of it
I hid behind the obscured nature of it
It sounded like madness and it took guts to expose
The feedback I have had from this so far from tutorials is very positive. I’ve had tutorials with both Kerry Andrews and Anna Ray about the work.
Next steps:
To develop the work and continue with the series. I want to experiment more with the editing and get to use some more techniques with blending the sound, words and images together more as a visual poem. I am thinking about using spoken word again in some way to bring a verbal dimension to the work.
Tina Culverhouse 