Banksy had it right. You know when you have those days/weeks, perhaps even months, where it feels like everything is falling apart around you and bad luck is stalking you like the tax collector? Then suddenly there's a moment of clarity; where life decides to throw in a spontaneous act of kindness and show you there is hope. I know this is making me sound like a religious preacher, or having some kind of hippy-esque revelation, but since being diagnosed with my illness it's completely transformed my way of thinking. It seems to have made me a lot more sensitive to the subtle things in life that can be easily transformed into a metaphore if a poet thought about it. For example, a beautiful orchid plant was bought for me when I first met someone who has dramatically changed my life for the better. Their reasoning for buying the orchid plant was that it lives without hardly any food, yet remains one of the most beautiful flowers. It blossomed and seemed to synchronise itself with everything that was happening in my life at the time, until I went back home to Malaysia and when I returned, I discovered it was gradually clawing its way out the livingroom window, wilting. All the petals had dropped and the only essence of life that remained was a closed bud at the top of the stem which had refused to open since it was given to me. Panic stricken, I gave it some love, watered it, read it bed-time stories and did everything maternally possible [the bed-time story part may or may not be true] as all I could think about was how the life of something had so much reflection upon my life. Since that desperate date, the bud has blossomed into a statement of an orchid flower, proudly trying to escape my house as opposed to desperately [see photo]. Now every time I look at it, it actually gives me hope. Something so simple...
So I'm basing my work on this; the hope, the life we live in, the notion that it's easy to forget how beautiful life is because we coat it with so much shit. Especially when you live in the city and are surrounded by a suffocating grey concrete environment, everyone's feeling the hellish burn of the credit crunch and the continuous reminder of how we're all killing the Earth. Chuck Palahniuk wrote:
"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."It's interesting to see what things make people feel peace, and like I mentioned before -- the spontaneous acts of kindness and/or the subtle beauty in life -- are what brings peace to me. Also the sounds in our lives, the atmosphere, the things we hear have a great impact upon our general being and mindset. As I've been working heavily with sound production the past few weeks, and will continue to do so over the next few months, I have noticed how much of an affect it can make on the emotions of an individual and the physical implications are amazing. For instance, when you hear a peace of music that sends a charge down your spine, causing goosebumps and the hairs on your skin to stand in up in ovation -- to think, to feel and to know that this physical reaction is caused by a sensative response to the sounds you're engaging in is (to me) fascinating. How music/sound can have this impact upon us more than words ever could (albeit, there are some people out there who can actually make this reaction with words too and, in my eyes, they are great masters). As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "Music is the universal language of mankind" and this is something I've been experimenting with in conjunction with lens based media.
I'm experimenting with this notion of emotive response to the synchronisation of improvised music and the natural element of photographic/filmed footage. The natural element being the subject featured.
The idea began when I was 16 years old, and I made my first stop-motion film to the guitar playing of the wonderfully happy man that is Elliott Smith. The film was based on the word "Isolation" and a series of photographic responses that conveyed differing subjects being isolated, creating a narrative that brought all these people together. Funnily enough, it was created at a time where the school had no photographic facilities and no software to work with, and I was also photographing people within the school who had fallen out with each other and often went through isolating periods of only indulging in work and rarely ever socialising (plus the school was heavily academic so Art was frowned upon, as was a social life). The work got me a place at Central Saint Martins, but as I was too young, I couldn't attend the university nor could I afford to move to London.
My second attempt was when I moved to London and created a stop-motion film dedicated to the house I lived in and the things we all got up to behind closed doors. Sadly the music used is under copyright so it couldn't be published, but I'm working on it! The third attempt was a film entiteld "Memo" which was my first stop-motion that infused my own improvised piano piece as well as spoken word. It was also the first film I had made as a direct expression to coping with my disease, with the wonderful mentoring of artist, Thomas Haywood. The feedback I received for this film came from all over the world in all different variations of communication. I had phonecalls, text messages, emails, facebook messages, meetings with other artists who told me their thoughts and feelings about the piece and how it had impacted them somehow. I then returned to my parents' place to re-record the piano piece but could no longer recreate anything like it. I had no idea what keys I was pushing, no idea what mentality I was in, it was just completely disjointed to how I played the day I was recording -- plus, I'd no idea how I'd even thought it up in the first place. Considering I can't write or read musc, there was no way I could play it, let alone remember it, key for key. Instead, I decided to create other pieces; one of which was my own take on Einaudi's "Due Tramonti" and another was a weird Chinese sounding melody that was mostly based on hitting a load of black keys that felt right.
These piano pieces sat untouched, collecting dust for a while with only one piece being sent to a few musically inclined friends of mine to get their take on it, but I'm now incorporating them within my stop-motion and film pieces. Creating a short film and then chosing the right piece completely transforms the context of the film and the narrative/message you want to convey. So I'm now on some kind of weird experimental mission to see how people feel when they watch these short films, and how the music also effects them. It's got to the point where I'm practically living, breathing and now even having nightmares about all this kind of work -- I managed to sleep for the first time since Saturday night and woke myself up from dreaming about taking photographs of a cinematic dance production, and my meter reader broke. I either woke up from boring myself to death, or from the sheer panic of how expensive it'd be to replace a light meter sensor for a DSLR. This concerns me.
Thankfully my break away from Photography will be a great few hours dedicated to musical loving at PoeJazzi in Camden's Proud Galleries on Monday evening. I'll be heading straight from a photoshoot tour of the coast of Kent with a make-up production team I often collaborate with, so it'll be so nice to just relax and enjoy time with music and friends. Plus, I'm designated door lady. Woop woop!
So if you've read this far, you deserve an award. So come here:
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