attempted introductions – reflection on my self portrait

I think straight off the bat it says a lot about me when I reflect on how I approached the topic of painting my own self-portrait. In my mind this condensation of my existence really manifested itself within the concept of ones life flashing before their eyes as they die. Approaching this project brief I tried to imagine exactly what sights I would see, what sounds I would hear, were my life to condense itself into a grim sort of highlights reel, moments before death. This lead me to approach this project with an overarching theme of qualia; images and objects that held within them deep and extensive experiences that couldn’t be linguistically described or even necessarily linked directly to the images and objects themselves. My photoset is created to be a visualisation of my life less in literal terms than in fleeting images holding secondhand significance. Some are very obvious points of influence like the image of my father who has obviously had a great impact on me throughout the years, and others are more subversive; take the door lacking a handle, for instance. this door once lead to the front half of my house, the half my mum inhabited for the first 8 years of my life. She has since moved yet that door continues to represent the unusual dynamic that set the landscape of my early childhood.

the other 4 images (including the picture of my beautiful, graceful, majestic and wonderfully fat cat) set a scene for my day to day existence. The subject matter is reasonably mundane but constant points of my life; the sanctuary of my fathers library… the place on my parents bed my cat sits in the afternoon when the sun is juuust right… the vase in the kitchen that always holds new flowers. Finally I also decided to include an image of myself, in my bedroom looking out my window. I wanted this sort of image not only for its placement in the tiny portion of space that I easily spend the most time in, but also for the reflection. Any image of myself I wanted depicted through a reflection as that is the only way that I can see myself.

The audio clips that I collected ran on a similar vain of thought. What sounds resonated most with me in my life, I attempted to collect. Living so close to the river the sounds of birds are a constant for me, so they were included along side the distant sound of the ice-cream van that comes around every summer, but never passes our street. These sounds often fall into the background of my life as neither pulls my attention but they do, in their own way, contribute to the fabric of how I live. I also added a small clip of me practicing strumming patterns and chord progressions on the guitar. whilst I no longer take lessons I still often sit down and play with the chords, picking out tunes that I have stuck in my head.

Overall I enjoy the image of myself that I have created through a mixture of photography, audio, video elements. I think it has an effective ability to display subtle constants within my life and experiences that bind together who I am in an accurate (although brief) self portrait. Unedited material is a struggle for me as predominantly I find my creative process is expressed in a post production setting. never the less this culmination of raw footage allowed me to explore sensory aspects of my life and identity in perhaps their purest form.