BA Fine Art: Year 2 Week 4-6

Recently I have been working on:

Lemon Film (Test)

I shot this in my bedroom using DSLR; the sound was unusable as it was really bad quality, and I was trying to capture the discomfort I felt as I ate the lemon, I wanted people to watch it and feel uncomfortable with what I was doing or to feel disgusted with the faces I was pulling.

The sound piece is email correspondence between myself and my landlord, detailing the killing of a rat in our house – I wanted a passive aggressive storytelling to accompany the lemon-eating, as the visual of it is repulsive, and the email correspondence is intentionally funny and light-hearted, spoken in a monotonous voice, however the actual events surrounding the rat and our killing of it was horrible. What I wanted from telling this story was for people to be disgusted with me, as when I tell it in person, it is disturbing, but my personality makes the story-telling funny. I don’t think, however, that the lemon film and the rat narrative go together, as piecing them together feels like I am just shoving things together to increase their emotional magnitude. I think the rat story needs to be developed further on its own, and the lemon film is a subtle exploration into self-inflicted pain that also needs to exist in its own space.

Lemon Film (Studio)

My main issue with films I have shot before is that I am more concerned with the concept rather than the execution of the film itself, and a lack of care with details in order to make the film the best it can be technically. This is not to say that my films will have to be like this all the time, but I should at least try to make a well shot, well lit, film with good audio. Whilst it is all one shot and the editing of the video is minimal, I really focused on taking the concept form the test shoot and making it the best I could.

I ate 3 lemons this time, and really make the act as disgusting as possible, and whilst it really physically hurt at the time, I felt better afterwards, like the lemons we’re sort of cleansing. This film is probably a documentation of a performance, or a performance that is augmented by film. Whilst I shot it in 50fps because I was unsure of whether to slow it down or not, I decided not to in the end as my tutor suggested that it would be romanticising the act, the disgusting expressions. My issue now is, is the fact that I filmed it romanticising these actions? Should I have performed it in real time? The clinically white studio background and lighting was meant to sterilise the performance, however now I think it is framing it, but I am not sure how.

Goodnight Parsley

This is not a fully realised piece yet, but an ongoing collection of the interactions between myself, my flatmates and the rats living in my house, and our landlord’s refusal to get rid of them. Everything at the moment is documentation of real events and conversations, however I am thinking of expanding the collection to a series of made objects, such as glue traps, snap traps, and cava bottles (which is what we used to beat the first rat to death), and possibly making ‘ceremonial’ objects from these, as the killing of the rat itself was ceremonial, in that my flatmate who killed it spoke to it before she beat it, I smudged the kitchen with sage afterwards, and my other 2 flatmates prayed and cleaned the kitchen. The most interesting part of this relationship, for me, is that I am vegan, and killing a rat with a cava bottle should be against my beliefs. I am interested in this strange relationship that I as a city dweller have with nature, this invasion of nature into my home, and how my ethical choices as a consumer could be deemed worthless compared to the cruelty of letting an animal die on my kitchen work surface. It has been suggested to me that I keep collecting these things, but also collect things that relate to the lifestyle/identity that I seem to represent, the typical pretty-white-middle-class-healthy-yoga-and-nature-loving-vegan-girl.