A long, long time ago, in a desert far, far away…

I designed a project as part of my year 12 drama/theatre studies.

It involved shadow puppetry.

It wasn’t something anyone else in my cohort was really interested in.  They all had TVs at home, so their cultural influences looked very, very different from a weirdo like me. So it was mainly a solo project…  Two of my fellow students helped out in the performance of it (and I’m eternally grateful to them) but I made all the puppets, screen, chose the music etc. etc.

It was a jungle story where um… a bunch of animals ate each other… and as a narrative, it was not well thought out.  To quote Marcel Dorney, the thing was ‘prehistoric’ and never made it to the insta-vim-tub virality that is available to current 17 year-olds.    I’m quite glad no document of it exists.

Gee I loved the medium, though.

I still do.

The years passed and theatre generally, as well as music took over most of my artistic endeavours.  Poetry played a greater role than visual arts for a long time too.  But flash forward, to a far more advanced technological age and, via ‘The You – Tubes’ I discovered a variety of animations, which spoke to me and reminded me of my earlier obsessions.

One was a bunch of lullabies from around the world.  You can go here to start finding them.  I find them so very beautiful.

Much more recently I’ve found the story of Lotte Reiniger, which you may, or may not, know much about.  I was already aware of her in a general way, hence my interest in shadow puppetry, and had seen some stills of her films – but I had no access, then, to the actual animations.  Enjoy tracking her down.

And then, in the mid-2000s, I came across (as did the rest of the world) the viral vid of the hyper-talented Kseniya Simonova, who won (of all things) ‘Ukraine’s Got Talent’.  [Side note:  any iteration of ‘Got Talent’ is… er… problematic for me.  I am very much not a fan of competitive art practices.] Yet, her work connected to something fundamental in me.  Her performative storytelling using visual art was able to combine all of the good stuff all at once, as far as I was concerned, in a wonderfully theatrical way.

You can find many other examples of this technique of live illustration using sand and projection art here.  And here.  And here.  And here.  And…

None of this is what I do.

The examples I have given above all require a combination of glass tables, lighting source, camera, projector and projection surface – a pretty complicated setup, therefore, and one that is definitely not portable.  Or affordable and therefore … limited, to my mind.

But they did remind me of my own relationship with over-head projectors., a technology which has been superceded in education settings.  And I’d experienced for myself the attraction they had, and still have, in a dark room.

There is something about this one-armed one-eyed beast, which invites people to get close.  Like a campfire in the desert, it is an open welcome.  I have very strong memories of cold, dark, morning classrooms and students huddling around the projector for warmth and comfort and focused conversation.

Now, nearly all of them have become just another pocket of real estate in the landfill dotting our landscape.  Or perhaps have been melted down for their metal.  Or both.

So, firstly, repurposing one makes sense to me in ways equally driven by logic and sentiment.

Secondly, I’ve been influenced by images used by Paolo Freire in his culture circles in order to begin and prompt discussion for adult literacy, also using the shared event of an image projected onto a screen.

Then there are the works of the various charcoal and print artists who I grew up with and was surrounded by, including Käthe Kollwitz, and A. Paul Weber  (if you are happy to read German you can find more images here.  I especially love his jesters and fools).  The monochrome of many of the works of Maurits Cornelis Escher was a huge influence, as was Wilhelm Busch, the grandfather of modern cartooning, and many, many more illustrators of Märchen and folk-tales around the world who worked in ink, water-colour, woodblock printing, etchings…

So many of the images of my childhood were black and white, whether book, film or television.  And there is a particular depth, shape and texture in the world of black, grey and white, which still attracts and which colour distracts from.  At least, that was my experience.

Lastly, if you have never met her before, let me introduce you to the singularly innovative Caroline Leaf:

She has created – throughout her career – dynamic, grounded and unique animations, using a staggering array of techniques, including scratching images directly onto film stock.  Her sand projection work The Owl who Married the Goose is charming, sweet, comically tragic and wryly humorous.  It was created in collaboration with Inuit artists and is in the Inuktitut language.  If I can create a work that rings with the palpable authenticity she taps into, even if only for a single moment, I will consider myself satisfied.

This, then, is the path so far.

Please let me know if you think there are any signposts or landmarks or memorable giants or fellow travellers I have forgotten or overlooked, or whose work I should meet.  I would, in either case, be very, very grateful.

In the meantime, may you travel joyfully across the landscapes beneath your feet.

Share your bit of the map sometime, yeah?

At the beginning of the end of 2017, I created a short ‘gif’-like animation to wish my friends and family a great beginning to the new year.

Then my mum came to visit and we had lots of long conversations about the past generally, and this year specifically. I was trying to distill my thinking about end of year reflections into 3-5 questions.

Of course, because this is the way I seem to work, I collated a sum total of 126 questions.

In preparation.

With the intention to leisurely edit them to a usable size…

My patient and long-suffering mum kindly helped me to whittle all of that down to, maybe, 23. That process alone was simultaneously revealing and exhausting. We eventually decided to cheat and allow chance to make the remaining decisions.

Using a coconut bowl from the Solomon Islands, I put the remaining 20+ questions into it, for an open-ended process that would allow people to choose randomly, but also to dismiss and choose again if the question didn’t work for them.

The result of all of this preparation was the collection of images you can see in the following video, with me building the individual images and asking lots of useless details, such as, “Was there a tree next to the building?” and “Did the paths run straight, or were they more organic?”  And my mum patiently answering as well as clicking on the camera dooverlackie to capture them:

Then on New Year’s Eve itself, I once more attached the bedsheet to my front window blinds outside our study (as we did on the rained-out Halloween) and played with sand.

My mother and partner both generously participated as we watched the clock tick down to midnight.  Well… kinda… To be honest, in the end, we forgot about time.  Which was quite sweet, actually…

And, wonderfully, several of our our neighbours took time out from their own celebrations to watch and comment. One brave soul cheerfully, joined our process, answered questions from the ‘Tree of Life’ bowl with good humour and joined the conversation between words and images. These were the results, with their questions (if any) attached:

A  response to: “What nourished you in 2017?”

A response to:  “What was the best compliment you received in 2017?”  – the answer was:  “You think like a much older person.”

A response to:  “What would you like to do next year, that you did this year?”

And, a response to:  “What would you do in 2018, if you knew you could not possibly fail?”

Of course it all couldn’t happen in the Australian outdoors without some unexpected fly-by-nights.  Who were duly celebrated:

And so, reflecting, now, on the reflection…

I think the process has distilled my questions and I can’t wait to use them, in their new and condensed iteration:

“What grains of sand are you happy to leave behind?”

“What grains of sand are itching at you right now?”

“What sand dunes and oceans would you be happy to explore next?”

“What would you like this mirror made of glass, sand and light to reflect?”