At the beginning of my PhD journey I felt that I wanted to record the journey in film and create little film montages for each object of the process. This was for one reason, because I like the idea of being able to witness the process but also because my project was trying to capture whether emotions could be embedded within the object I wanted people to see this too.
Having discussed with my supervisors and thought about this, the filming has wained and dropped off. Not completely, but partially with the latter objects. It hasn’t felt as necessary to capture the process. I still take still pictures of the different stages that I will utilise, but the moving image somewhat hampers the experience. With filming I am always conscious that I need to make sure that my hands and the thing I’m working on is in shot and people will be able to see what is going on. Kind of framing it for an audience. This is something that doesn’t link with my PhD idea of transmission of emotions and so actually creating the videos doesn’t feel fully part of it. Also creating the videos means I have less time to spend on my making and when the objects are displayed in an exhibition I want people to look at these and spend time contemplating the finished pieces rather than looking at the videos, that with my skill may not be as well produced as they could be, meaning again that it takes away from the overall finished feel of the exhibition.
Therefore I am just focussing on my making and the stories that I have to transfer into the pieces at the moment so I don’t get distracted by the camera. I may set it up in the background for some things but not in a way that it is invasive to the project. I’ve found it interesting coming to this conclusion as a thing that I thought would be integral to the project actually has ended up being something that could have hampered the project in the end.
A Matter of Artefact 