Moving on to clay
One of the main reasons for me being in New Zealand for these seven weeks from the end of December to the middle of February is to work towards an exhibition I will be having in Wellington in November. The exhibition is at the crafts gallery, Avid which means one thing- that my work must be in clay. I have agonised about this for a while, not having touched the stuff for longer than I want to admit. But I have now, two weeks into it, found that my old passion has returned and I am again feeling excited about the process of transforming an amorphous, wet (and at times bloody cold) mass into forms with distinct shape, colour and tactile properties.
The process with clay overlapped the work I was doing with film. I wanted to find some kind of point where these seemingly divergent media could meet. Making films for me become a process of gathering material and ideas, then playing around and in the end creating stories. The making of every film required a set of background films, which I made during the day. In the evenings I would project these background films onto things and then I would film these results. The next day I edited all the small bits of film I had made the evening before into my ’final’ films. The last couple of films I played around with a sound track.
So now to clay. I challenge was to find a way that I could tell a story with clay using a similar process I used for making my films- which perhaps could be described as a process of collecting, documenting, combining and resolving. I wanted to use projections and I wanted to gather information from around me. These things I was sure of.
I spent a few days playing with folding paper models of a basic house shape and projecting my films onto them. I then took photos during different parts of the film as the paper forms changed depending on the images projected onto them. I was quite taken by how this simple idea contained huge potential for experimentation with form and surface. But I needed to find a better idea to get me engaged in the forms.
