Muddy Water

When a pond is clouded by mud, do you stir a stick through it? Or must you wait for it to settle at the bottom? 

Much like the act of waiting for muddy water to clear itself, the act of honing in on the breath during meditation allows for your thoughts to subside naturally and for your mind to clear up. 

Inspired by this, my work attempts to “scratch an itch in the brain” of the audience as the solid shapes, clean lines, and balanced composition provide them with a satisfying sense of clarity and structure. Just as the breath serves as a focal point in meditation, the ambiguous black shapes also act as a focal point for my audience to fixate on and decipher, bringing them into the present and thus clearing their minds from distracting thoughts of past or future.

On the other hand, my film captures my form of meditation through movement. Like performance artists such as Marina Abramovic and Zhang Huan, my artistic process involved a high level of physical endurance that, over time, propelled me into a state of deep focus and awareness of how my body interacted with the negative space around me.

In adding video effects post-production, my film resembles that of the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, whose repetitious series sought to deconstruct fast-paced movements and investigate the separate details that made them whole. Using his frame by frame approach, I visualise the feeling of being clouded by thoughts and consequently losing clarity in my daily life. 

---- May 2022 ----

HSC Visual Arts Body of Work. 

Eight b&w photographs, two concertina-folded photographs and one video made to play on loop.