Finished my essay over Sunday and Monday. Had our last Monday Meeting live on Teams. Then finished editing my video and adding sound to post in the virtual gallery on Teams to discuss at our group tutorial on Tuesday. I had loads of trouble with my video editing program and I wasn’t really that happy with it but wanted some feedback.
At the group tutorial, I got very useful feedback from everyone. Laurie said it made her feel uncomfortably part of the problem (internalised misogyny/patriarchy/ body shaming etc…) and she loved the wolf character. Chantal said she liked the ridiculousness of how the wolf behaved and that the first part made her think of a scary teen movie where everyone was running from a monster, because of the way it was filmed (Charlie had filmed me on my phone running about the young willow woods at Coldhome, hiding behind/humping trees etc…). Anna said she liked the mix between sinister and innocence (because of the naivety of the costumes partly).
My tutor Kate said she had watched it and had then watched my performance video from last semester (the projected one). She said I was a very good writer and the spoken work piece, and my voice had worked so well last time, she wondered why I hadn’t used more of that this time, or at least in sections. (I had mostly just sounds this time, with occasional words). She also said I moved my body brilliantly in the last one and she’d have liked to have seen more of this too. Maybe me playing with more male movements as I wasn’t convincing maybe as the wolf. She said I could ignore her, but I think she kind of hit the nail on the head with her critique, as I knew I wasn’t really happy with it.
I said that, even though I knew last semesters video had worked better, I was trying to get away from using the same formula and had wanted to try something different. I was worried that I’d peaked too early with last year’s work, ha ha! I will probably not match that for the rest of art school!
However, since the tutorial, I have been researching poetry and working on a spoken word piece for possibly a new version of the video. I have now recorded the words with accompanying music/sound and am exploring different video options.
I finished a new video with spoken word piece on Saturday and uploaded it to the Virtual Studio on Teams. Much happier with this one, though not 100% so. Been struggling so much with electricity and software though that this is the best I think I can manage under the circumstances. I found lots of other footage I had already filmed before the uni closed which I could use, which was great, because I was really noticing and missing the lack of the seminar room (white space) for filming in.
I discovered a course mates research for her work from last semester on Instagram (Kirsty Sharp) and wished I’d known about the books she had read at the beginning of the semester. The ideas I wanted to express, sort of emerged slowly through my work and by the time I realised what I was saying, I had left it too late to get a hold of and read these books. But I am glad I know about them for future work. They are Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Meat Market by Laurie Penny and One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power. I had instead, read some articles online which were helpful but not nearly as expansive and in depth as the snippets I saw photographed from these books.
I will not manage to make a performance based on my second etching now, (the medicalisation of birth) or a poem, which is fine, as this is a much bigger subject anyway, which I would rather do much more research on and work on as a whole separate project. Possibly widening it to investigating the western attitude to health. I now just need to finish arranging the images of my work on my website to submit. Update my CV and finish my Artists Statement, which is already pretty much written.
Rachel Bride Ashton 