- Lucy and I discussed my charcoal drawings and talked about perhaps mixing up the drawing by use of animation – look at William Kentridge – we discussed rather than sticking on pictures of houses, use the videos of houses and woods to project into or through the drawings.
- Dirt is still part of the work – I still want to use the earth from the woods in some way – Lucy suggested covering objects in pva and applying the mud like glitter – look at Emma Saffy Wilson and her mud sculptures – I could use this technique for the houses and dolls
- In my seminar group with Kate I have been researching around subjects around dirt, houses and homes and we were asked to present a piece of writing to discuss in our seminar
- I chose this piece that I had written
“Got to eat a whole house full of dirt before you die”
I had dropped the most favourite thing to eat, in the whole world, which was a piece of edam cheese on my nanna’s kitchen floor.
I looked down upon the cheese and could have laid down with it. My mum suggested I pick it up, which I did, but this revealed the dirt and dust that had stuck to the fat of the cheese and which, through my tears, magnified to a gigantic scale.
I looked to my mum for direction, for her gentle smile and eyes of love – she reassured me by saying that I would have to eat a whole house full of dirt before I died.
What she didn’t realise and never did was that from that moment and for years to come I really believed that this was what I would ‘have’ to do. I imagined the marathon, the torture and daily would think about how I would achieve it. My nightmares were of my training. Would I have to live forever because I couldn’t complete the task?
- It took a lot for me to read this out – it is personal and I am very unconfident about my writing.
- Whilst reading this I realise that most of my work isn’t about dirt but is about home and memory – the dirt is just part of that
- I began exploring homes and everything took me back to a sense of place, being lost, memories, traces, indices and stories – I looked at Rachel Whiteread again – it just feels so right in many ways for her work to be part of my proposal. The dirt that is pertinent to me, isn’t the type of dirt that is part of ritual or culture, it is more about the shit on the shoe or the dirt and secrets we hide. The pipes are the vessel to carry the dirt away or to conceal it.
- I still feel that film is a useful part of my research and thinking and Wes Anderson‘s use of homes, spaces, rooms, tents – the pan shot at the beginning of Moonrise Kingdom