chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog - Tumblr blog

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

20/2/18

Final Installation of The Source

Film and Audio

14.35 minutes looped

Ceramics Bowls and Plates, Transparent Glaze

(Made from the clay dug from the house where I grew up) 

Installation Chelsea College of Art, D Block 

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

The Source

14.35 minutes, Looped

Film and Audio

This film sees the coming together of two works in progress, first the work entitled Seasons and then The Golden Hour. 

I plan to exhibit it with the ceramics I have made from my own clay. This currently includes 9 bowls and 9 plates. 

I am working towards a final work that will integrate the ceramics into the film when there will be 9 small bowls, 9 large bowls and 9 plates. I plant to illustrate this relationship of the clay to the lake perhaps by filming myself digging the earth on the Island on the lake, or by showing the bowls and plates being drawn out of the lake, or washed in the water of the lake or nearby streams. 

I also intend to build on the symbol of the circle in this work, not only the circular motion of the camera and thus the viewers experience, but also the circle motif of the plates and bowls, and the circular motion inherent to the crating of the bowls themselves. I will perhaps include footage of the ceramics filmed in my fathers dining room which has a circular table where my family meets to eat at important occasions. 

The Audio

The soundtrack of this film is taken from a song I intended to write about growing up in the home of my childhood, where only my father lives now. The song accompanied by the piano, in the end I never developed lyrics I was happy with so recorded it as an instrumental on my iPhone. I have been working with this basic and spontaneous recording to make the soundtrack of this film, experimenting with various paces and layering, and editing some part into repletion and changing the order of the original piece. 

I have also integrated an audio recording of me digging earth in my garden, to suggest the relationship of the clay of the ceramics to the location of the lake, from where the clay comes. I think although the audio is low-fi it provides an atmosphere that enhances moods of the footage. 

I plan to continue work on the audio, perhaps recording it in better quality to be more like the song I have created through editing the previous song. I also want to capture the sounds of the lake using a hydro mic and integrate this as well. 

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Seasons and The Golden Hour 

These are two films I am currently working on, both focus on the lake near the house where I grew up, where my father still lives. I used the DJI OSMO 4K camera to film the lake which has an inbuilt gimble to film the lake, whilst travelling around it in a circular formation on a quad bike, in order to get smooth imagery. 

Both films bring together two recordings of separate rotations around the lake together in split screen. 

Seasons brings together two clockwise rotations, one shot in winter and the other in autumn.

The Golden Hour brings together, two rotations shot one after the other at sunset, one clockwise the other anti-clockwise. Because they are shot at this crucial time of rapid natural light change, although each shot is filmed in succession they differ in light and intensity. The clips are also more low-fi because of the light leaving, I think this allows for a surreal effect. I believe that this section could be used as Celine Bozon calls it in Félicité a “dream sequence” for the full film I am working towards. 

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

“I Think It’s For The Best”

Film 

5.07 minutes 

Audio, taken from LSE lectures on Unrequited Love 

Last year I produced work building a structure that would later become a site for a performance piece in my back garden. This work was made collaboratively with my house mate and fellow art student Miranda Bentley Klein, who studies at Goldsmiths. Since this time our work has take a more independent directions and although we still exchange ideas the garden has been left abandoned, now overgrown and littered with the debris we collected to make our piece.

Since that time, another flat mate and Goldsmiths art student Viviana Cerquera, has begun working in the garden and we are now collaborating on this work. 

Viviana’s piece captures the character of a space traveller, who carries with her a collection of teeth moulds, we can assume these have been taken from ex lovers. Overlaid is an audio taken from a lecture she attended on the topic of unrequited love. The space traveller appears to be mourning ex lovers, and wandering and dancing through the garden in a solitary manner that encourages both curiosity, comedy and empathy. 

I play the role of the space traveller and am directed by vivianna, although at first I came into it just in an acting role, now the work is becoming more collaborative. Not only is she using the set created by Miranda and myself for her film, but we are also working towards integrating our two film works, my footage of the lake and hers of the space traveller in the garden. We both attended Celine Bozon’s lecture on “Félicité”, and are both inspired by this idea of the dream sequence. We want to integrate the footage from “The Golden Hour” with her piece “I Think It’s For The Best”, to suggest that perhaps this is the origin of the space traveller, or a place in the space traveller’s imagination. We may also film me in the space suit in the setting of the lake. 

http://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2017/09/20170926t1830vWT/unrequited-love

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

The Book and The Old Arm Chair

1.5 x 1.5 meters

Chair and Headphones with MP3 player

Installation Chelsea College of Art, The Cook House

This piece brought together the poetry of my great grandmother recorded by her daughter (my grandmother) towards the end of her life. Three of my great grandmothers poems are collaged with a song I wrote myself, recorded by myself on my iPhone after I had written it. Finally a recording of my mother, reading the lyrics of my own song is included.

Here 4 generations of women are brought together, in the act of recording or reciting poetry, written by myself and my great grandmother. I want to encourage musing upon the power of the maternal line and the idea of the mother as the home, and the first environment. 

The songs and the poems revolve around ideas of the home and objects within the home that have particular significance or may hold memories of a time or relationship. How life and experience are temporal, ephemeral but how some things might endure, perhaps the objects we pass down, perhaps recordings like these or even love. What can live on between each generation?  Memories, objects, creative practices or creativity itself?  

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Throwing bowls 

I have been learning how to throw for a few months now, taking a short course over summer and coming when I can to the ceramics work shop at Chelsea since the start of third year. 

I have thus produced 9 bowls by first throwing the bowls, and then turning them in order to remove excess clay and to finish them with foot rings. These bowls have now been fired and glazed and will be installedl with the film entitled The Source that will be projected. 

These 9 bowls will later be used as props in a film piece I am working towards and will be integrated with footage of the lake and music of my own composition. I am glad to have developed a skill and feel this has made the most of the clay that I dug and processed myself. Throughout the process I have come to appreciate the value craft and who this links with my ideas of preservation of an experience. The process also revolves around circles, rotations and recycling. This has enhanced my thinking behind the work and made the links between my ceramic and filmic work deeper. 

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Making plates

I dug clay from my father’s garden with the intention of creating a dinner set of 3 pieces, for nine people. Starter, main and desert. Although I wanted to throw the bowls and develop a skill and engage with a medium that deals with the theme of circles, cycles and rejuvenation that work is based on, I decided to press the plates using a mould. This allows for more plates to be made with greater speed and practicality that will look more similar in aesthetic. 

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Earth to…

2017

40 x 10  x 12 cm

Installation Chelsea College of Art

Earth dug from the house I grew up in, broken down into stones, grit, slurry, clay, fired clay in glass jars.

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Digging Clay May 2017

I began by digging nearly a 3 foot deep hole, I then put what I dug in a wheelbarrow and wheeled it to an empty part of the garage.Here I laid out the earth and mashed it up with a shovel in an attempt to let it dry quicker. I left this for two weeks and then I divided the hardened mud into 7 rubble bags and sealed them. 

I then emptied out the hardened pieces in divided loads in order to break them up into smaller pieces meaning that when I added water they would break down more easily. The water allows the stones to sink to the bottom and the grass and leafy parts to float to the top, where I decant them using a kitchen sieve.

I then sieved this mixture with a large garden sieve, and repeated this process using sieves with progressively smaller holes, in order to make the clay purer and purer.

I left this over summer to sour, now after several months it is ready to use.

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Dissertation Research 

The research that informed my dissertation was based largely on the work of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, and his theorisation of the infant-mother relaitonship. Winnicott contends that the infant does not experience itself as a separate entity from the mother in the early days of infancy, and thus when it comes to recognise itself as a separate being, it draws upon an object to aid in this transition, called the transitional object. I extended this theory to the experience of grief (another type of separation) and how this may relate to the first experience of separation from the mother in infancy. How we might call on the physical world to negotiate this separation, as Winnicott suggests we did in infancy with our use of the transitional object. 

By delving into the work of psychoanalysts like Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas as well as the work of anthropologist Daniel Miller, I was able to analyse the way in which we form relationships with the objects within our homes, and how these relationships may play out in miniature other relationships held with loved ones in our lives, and gives these relationships enduring life, when a loved one passes on. Most crucially, I examined how these complex relationships with objects are built upon the relationship we share with the mother at the beginning of our existence.

In terms of my practice, this research has led me to explore ideas of origin, how life continues form this and how this life might endure beyond death. I am dealing with ideas of the source, both in nature and perhaps more on a metaphorical level. Fundamentally I believe what fascinates me is the source of our creativity, and where this extends to, not just within the realms of the arts but within the everyday. How creativity may offers us a way of interpreting the world in way that allows for a greater and understanding. 

“Life is not linear, but ripples out from some centre point: from the cradle, to the home, to the grave; from the total oneness we share with the mother, to the independence of our self, to the development of relationships with others and with the physical world” - Exert from my dissertation 

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Brian Eno

A British composer, musician, record producer, singer-songwriter and visual artist, known as the father of ambient music, Eno has proved highly influential to me, not only in his musical work but his thoughts and ideas about what art really is.

“I concluded finally art is everything we don’t have to do, any area in our lives where we engage in non-functional stylisation, thats where were doing art.”

Eno’s music is highly conceptual and works with the creation of mood, the use of repetition and intermingles with his art practice. I found that listening not only to his work but to interviews explaining his ideas and methods have proven to be helpful in my own approach to creating a soundtrack for my own film “The Source”.

I have been using an audio recording made on my iPhone 2 years ago, altering the pace, adding sound recordings of both newly recorded piano and a recording of me digging into the earth with a shuffle,  and using repetition to alter it and give it new life, that harmonises with the film work. 

Eno is fascinated by the question why he and others make art and offers a variety of conclusions to this question. One in particular echoed the ideas I was working with in my dissertation building on the work of psychoanaylst and paediatrician D.W. Winnicott.

“we all know that children learn through playing, everybody understands that when kids are doing thinks like tipping liquid out of a cup and playing with stone and building things and singing songs and so on, we know that that thats all part of their way of learning to understand the world both physically and socially and intellectually and so on. nobody says “why are those children wasting their time doing that? Why arn’t they doing something useful?” You know that a child has to do that, thats their way of becoming acquainted with reality. So I came up with this Idea that children learn through play and adults play through art.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIVfwDJ-kDk

https://soundcloud.com/adam-buxton/ep-38-brian-eno-part-two-1

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Quarry 2015

Amie Siegel, Strata

South London Gallery

20 Jan- 26 March 2017 

“Quarry” 2015, Projected at cinematic scale in  South London Gallery’s main gallery, traces the excavation of marble from the deepest underground quarry in the world to its almost inevitable use in the modern luxury apartment of Manhattan skyscrapers”. It “Draws us into a mesmerising expose of the multi-layered relationships between art, labour, and value”.

For me Siegel, looks at the journeys that objects make, from raw material, to formed objects, to possessions that take on a personal meaning, to pieces that can speak of something even greater for example something of cultural significance. This grapples both with themes of ownership and ecology.

Working with the clay that I dug up from the garden of the house where I grew up, I am enjoying the raw and visceral interaction with material and the journey it takes from its beginnings to the context it ends up in. I am in the process of making a 3 piece dinner set for 9 people, one for each of my siblings and myself.

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/83264/amie-siegelstrata/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/23/amie-siegel-video-art-south-london-gallery

http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/amiesiegel

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Félicité Celine Bozon (Cinematography) , Alain Gomis (Director)

“Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis has created a film portrait in an ambient social-realist style, showing us a woman called Félicité: a bar singer in the tough streets of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gomis leaves it up to us to determine the precise level of irony in her name”.

“Cinematographer Céline Bozon contrives tremendous streetscape scenes around Kinshasa itself. It’s a film with seriousness and compassion, though a little lengthy and diffuse. Dramatic storm clouds gather and pass overhead without ever quite bursting into rain.”

I went to a lecture given by the cinematographer of this film, Celine Bozon, she gave some great advice on ametur film makers about being present but remembering your role to capture the action that takes place. She talked about shooting the “dream sequence” in this film Félicité, in which Félicité walks in the woods and then walks into a lake. It is this that has proved to have the most significant impact on me. My work with my own film of the lake features footage that I shot at sunset, I want this footage to develop into a “dream sequence” in the final work I am progressing towards that marries both my filmic and ceramic work and deals with ideas of the source of life, family and creativity.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/09/felicite-review-gritty-story-of-kinshasa-bar-singer

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

Guido Van De Werve

Nummer Veertien: Home

(Number 14: Home)

Melancholia, Somerset House 

The film explores the personal history of the artist intertwined with the cultural history of Chopin and Alexander the Great. This relationship and the film itself is structured by upon the journey the artist makes through the Netherlands, by means of a triathlon and by the sequence of the requiem written by himself that provides a soundtrack for the film.  I was inspired by Guido Van De Werve’s personal approach, unearths something so much larger than himself but still has the emotional depth of a story told by the person who lived it.

I have also found it inspiring to read and watch some interviews of the artist that shares some of my views on the nature of art and music. Guido Van De Werve has spoken of the “direct way that music communicates, and then later when I started doing visual Art, and also seeing a lot of Art I was always disappointed that it wouldn’t really touch me the way music had. I think thats also why I also ended up making films, because films do have this kind of directness, you know you see people laughing and crying in the cinema, in concerts but you hardly ever see them laughing and crying in museums.” This statement in particular resonates with me. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gf_5ENquEc

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/15/guido-van-der-werve-melancholia-somerset-house-interview

[chiaragilmoredocumentation-blog]

John Ackomfrah

Purple

The Curve- The Barbican

6 October 2017 – 7 January 2018

With the continuing theme that underpins the differing  rhythms and movements of the piece being water. This piece has made me consider the power of the imagery of water that is in my own film, that is in progress at the moment.

I want to explore the power of water of as a life source, the religiosity of water and its ecological relevance at this time. 

https://www.barbican.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/John%20Akomfrah_Press%20release%20July%202017%20FINAL.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/01/john-akomfrah-purple-climate-change