After attending Ed Atkins' lecture I became intrigued by the possibility of using gore / violence in my work as a signifier of inside trauma. I spoke to Dani who also uses this idea of physical appearance representing a deeper emotional state, wherein a red and beaten face reflects the way trauma manifests itself.
I have come to realise that cheesy pop music is an integral part of my life and who I am, the way I behave. I can always rely on the feeling of nostalgia and general excitement when I listen to Britney, and it was when I was on the train back from the Ed Atkins lecture, listening to Shania Twain's That Don't Impress Me Much that I understood the song as a post-trauma temporary therapy / using it as a quick fix for feeling overwhelmed because I know it will make me feel a certain way / and I started to think about exploring it as a piece of art.
This work is going to talk about the way I deal with men, the way I deal with the way they treat me, what they expect from me and how my relationship towards them has changed over the years. Shania's lyrics from That Don't Impress Me Much meant a lot to me because of this, because of the way she dismisses the men that think they are the centre of the world, but in actual fact aren't massively impressive. In my life I have had to deal with a lot of men assuming they are my superior, and a lot of the time I believed them and it altered the way I was. I realised that I have the power to cut these harmful characters out of my life and become my own protagonist again, after feeling like my life was not my own and that it had been ruined forever.
I feel like I have been avoiding making work actually about myself, channeling stereotypes through my work instead of talking about myself through my work. I'm going to talk about myself through the pop idols I have come to put faith in over the years - people like Britney Spears and Bridget Jones, who I know are problematic at best, but I'm choosing to acknowledge this kind of political imperfection and appreciate the music / films on a superficial and emotional level. Thinking about what they mean to me rather than the message they are sending out into the world.
I wrote a poem, about visualising bad things that I carry with me as jellyfish, kind of attached to me, kind of growing from my stomach.
slipping through my fingers all the time i try to capture every minute, the feelings in it
in a mouth, takes years to dissolve
~ I Can’t Believe I’m Too Bitter ~
looks like a peach, a bitch
I’m better
off angered than anchored
to that jellyfish lump
a bulbous clump
like grease down the sink
like please
blurry GIRL in ink
fixing holes in my leg and saying
fuck that dude!!!
fuck them duuuudes
big time MOOD
a cgi of a big blue sky
ribbons ’n’ meat strings
and my body that sings
screaming
one more time with meaning
lovely awful springtime cleaning
floating sometimes
and some time breathing
no thing once fine
somewhere down the line
promise sing
it will be fine
slipping through my fingers all the time
Originally this started out as a photography / installation piece - with the idea to photograph myself like I have in these Swish Swish Bish pieces, accompanied by a model of a jellyfish and a short, simple film of me mouthing the words to That Don't Impress Me Much but with the words from my poem appearing at the bottom of the screen - but then I realised it was bigger than that. There are so many more characters I want to embody, so many stages of trauma I want to depict, so I have decided to make a more complex film with me performing as multiple characters and a sound piece that I will make, like a mash up of all the songs that I relate to this work. It has been a daunting prospect to actually start this project, as it is both personal and ambitious, and I am unsure of how to plan for all of it, but today I hope to start coming up with solid characters and organising all my thoughts into this blog. I'm leaving room for this project to take a shape of it's own.
