Wednesday, 27 January 2016
Ritual is an important part of my current working methodology.My studio is located in a quiet, isolated part of the house. I always begin at the same time everyday,early morning after everyone has left for work or for school .There is a flask of masala chai(Indian spiced tea) set on a desk next to an electric sharpener with a lot many colour pencils and some good paper at hand.I listen to the radio ,especially to the news.The BBC World News has features like "Witness" or interviews of successful people (how a man killed a crocodile which had swallowed his wife) or of people who might have suffered a loss(the interviews of parents of children shot down by terrorits in a school in Pakistan). Or things impacting our lives - how to curb the Ebola virus and now the zika virus carrying mosquito.Facebook also has news.They are intimate but not private moments from people's lives-their little victories and their pain. I browse through various magazines National Geographic or Fashion magazines and look at the photographs.I photograph some of these photographs or tear them from out to look at them more closely later.
These give me little germs of ideas.I write down the ideas but I do not give them concrete shape by drawing them yet.I hold the ideas and let them grow and grow and they grow bigger inside my head. I think how much of what is reported is factual and how much is fictional. Sometimes facts are much stranger than fiction.For instance I read an article today about three people who accidentally died with gunshot wounds in USA this week alone.One of them was a three year old baby playing with his mother's purse while she attended to a phonecall. He found the gun in the purse and pulled the trigger, thereby shooting himself .There was an interview I heard a story about a seven year old girl in Africa who was repeatedly raped by a relative in her own home for two years. she was too scared to reach out to anyone in her family. She would wear several layers of clothing and hide under the bed hoping that the man would go away. What are the odds incidents like these might happen, yet they do.These kind of stories creep into my work.
On other days I dip into my memories.Sometimes I transpose real events as is without alterations and sometimes I add imagined elements to create half truths. Like I remembered my nursery teacher used to threaten children about tying them up the fan if they misbeahaved or the time when I nearly poked my finger into a pedestal fan as a child.These sort of memories/moments find their way into my work.
How much of memory is reliable anyway? As screenplay writer John Singleton said: "We invent dialogues for ourselves, rearrange chronology, try metaphor and assonance and rhythms to heighten emotion and dramatize, telescope events, eliminate extraneous detail, focus on key moments, images, ad infinitum". Visual narratives are not very different from written fiction.In both of them a part of the experiences of the maker comes through to the viewer/reader.To quote Dennis Wyatt Harding: "No one now can doubt that an author's work may reveal features of his personality and outlook that he had no intention of expressing... of which he may even be in the strict sense unconscious"
My drawings reveal my inner world and the external world through the lens dreamtime.They are my interpretation of events that have occured and are not necessarily a factual account of them.
John Singleton, 'The Short Story' in The Creative Writing Handbook, ed. John Singleton and Mary Luckhurst (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996), p. 100.
Denys Wyatt Harding, Experience Into Words, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974)
No comments:
Post a Comment