The act of taking photographs of the detail in interior spaces has taught me the act of looking. It’s like seeing the world through a hypersensitive lens.
I create environments which act like a Utopia, they accentuate our perception of everyday environments, showing the audience familiar visuals but in a exaggerated form, giving beauty to mundanities in an 'created' unfamiliar setting. My film acts to draw out forms which we may ignore or take for granted, showing them in a way which makes them look more surreal.
I use form, shape, light and colour to communicate feelings, emotions and concepts. The environment I create controls the atmosphere, and encourages the audience to look in detail at what surrounds them - hopefully leading them to see beauty in the objects they usually don’t take notice of, things in the routine of their everyday lives.
I am controlling the audience's perception of a mundane environment.
I took these images in response to the constructed poem 'Yes, Here's a Room'. I have used colour and form to illustrate the changing atmosphere within the narrative of the poem. The movement of light, shadows and colour also symbolise the transition of time throughout the poem. Whilst I was constructing these images I had to think about all the elements of the installation in order to create a coherent design. For example, knowing this film will become a projection meant the intensity of the colours might be affected, they would not be as clear and powerful as on the screen, so the boldness and vibrancy of the images was exaggerated.
The why I create images has developed from the way I have been collaging and drawing throughout my practice. I take a visual and I open it up, I create a gap, a glimpse of an environment throughout it. I like the idea of creating layers to form a narrative. The visual gap into a world behind the image creates a sense of time progressing, movement, something that is coming next, or something that's been left behind.
For this film, I have used 'the gap' to either take the viewers eyes to a specific part in the existing image, or to create a sense of time, when your experiencing something the whole world outside you current perception is still existing, the world living even when you can't see it. I feel that sometimes when I watch a film I am absorbed by the screen, that's the environment that I'm experiencing, not the room I'm in. This is way I like creating layers to a film, it gives depth and transition, there is more then one view point visual at the same time, and the viewer can experience both. I feel as though it also gives the viewer a sense that they are moving through this interior space, they are looking around, I am recreating the movement of their eyes as they experience a space.
As I discussed on my Poetry page, I decided to incorporate the poem into the film through spoken word. I recorded my own voice reading the entire poem as I felt I understood the pace and rhythm that I wanted the audience to experience. I felt that the spoken poem would allow the audience to immerse themselves in the atmosphere and narrative of this constructed poem, without any visual distraction of text. I edited the sequence of frames to the rhythm of the spoken poem, this shaped the transition between each image. I am worried that there is a certain disconnect between certain words and images, however the images work as an entirety, communicating the concepts within the poem as a whole sequence. I also feel as though sometimes a disconnect between image and words can encourage the audience to think more in order to make a connection. This curiosity in discovering the connection between the film and the audio can fuel their curiosity into the connection between the identity of space and the identity of a person. There is an existing strong relationship between both film and poem, each element feeds into the other, making the holistic communication a lot stronger.
I am in the process of recording a highly quality audio of the poem, which I will use in the film for the exhibition.