I think as artists we concentrate on perfection. On making a consumable, finished product, because we have to merchandise our skills to live in this capitalist world and so we learn to be better. We learn to be perfect.
But when you are creating nothing is perfect, you can always grow, always be better, and somewhere along the way I forgot that to get better you have to fail first, and that failure is the precursor of growth.
And so, it was liberating to be told to play, to fail, to experiment, to learn. As someone who grew up as a ‘gifted kid’, at some stage I grew out of being able to fail. It was always expected of me that I could do something, because I used to be good at it. It’s like the world grows up and leaves you behind. So, more than anything, these first six weeks have been a joyful experience of having back the pleasure of failing.
I have learnt to open up. I have posted work on my blog that I was incredibly proud of – my content warning film -, stuff that I have allowed myself to be incredibly vulnerable in, but also just my blog posting in general, I have let my heart spill open in those posts and trusted that the reveal of my process would cushion the fall. And I have created stuff that has just been bad – the poem film, though everyone was incredibly nice about it, but it’s okay I know it was bad. I had fun doing it and I’m learning that that’s way more important.
I feel like my work has gotten rougher over these six weeks. The first video I made for the longing poem was neatly edited and I spent time getting exactly the right angle and the essay film I just poured my heart out on some paper and recorded it and went, that’ll do. And this is a victory. Slowly I’m killing the perfectionist inside me. What I produce doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t even have to be good. All it has to do it matter, to have meaning, that’s enough.
I found studying the concept of the in-between, the things that you cannot put into words, or understand in conventional form really freeing. I’ve enjoyed grasping and not being particularly sure what I am grasping at but clutching my fingers around it, nonetheless.
There’s something untenable about being a creative, a way of understanding the world that always seems to leave something missing, or maybe that’s just me. These theories presented a way to try and begin to understand it, or at least to create in tandem with it.
Perhaps that’s why I was so drawn to both Phenomenology and Affect. The focus on tactility really spoke to the place deep inside of me that feels everything, that experiences the world through pain, and an ache and a longing and the way I understand how the body can react so viscerally to something that isn’t technically there. There was something in those theories when they asked me to figure out what it was to be alive in the world, I realised that I yearned to find that out, and it’s not something you can say, not something you put words or meaning to. It’s a feeling. When you have it, you know. These theories drew me back to the fact that I started creating to feel alive and that’s the feeling I chase when finishing a novel or movie, and the feeling that I want to delve into and drown in.
It’s also been fascinating to see what everyone else has done, to have the opportunity to learn from my peers as well. Everyone in this course thinks so differently to me, and I’ve loved being able to see how they approached the tasks.
I feel like I was supposed to say that I learnt something about different ways of perceiving the world, of approaching film making, and writing, and in some aspects I did. I learnt to follow feeling when I started responding to the tasks. I learnt that for something to have a story it does not have to have an easily accessible narrative; if one exists at all.But I’ll be real, I’ve always liked to push boundaries, I said in a blog post that the box and I were mortal enemies and I stand by that. But what I have learnt is how to give myself permission to follow my gut. Wherever that takes me, even if it’s into disaster. Because sometimes disaster is exactly where you are supposed to be. And that’s the kind of energy that I’ll now be able to take into the rest of the semester, and hopefully beyond.
