Our first MA project. The brief is ‘nothing’. How do you interpret that?
I choose to follow the more positive view that art creates ‘something’ out of ‘nothing’.
Sitting in my empty studio, I notice the rain on the window pane in front of me. I see the tissue paper on my notebook catching the raindrops. The water changes the colour and surface of the tissue paper. Afterwards, all that is left is a wrinkled piece of tissue. No one knows how beautiful the rain sounded and how mesmerising it was to watch the translucent tissue turn to grey. It made me realise how video can capture moments of beauty, of isolation, that would otherwise go unnoticed, except for someone watching, recording.
If you are alone in the studio and used to painting from life, what else is there but to paint your own image? And so I turned my line of thought to my own sense of identity and how ‘nothing’ can so easily describe how I often feel about myself. Somewhere along the line, I have lost my own sense of identity – always looking after others, thinking about 101 things to do before bedtime. Starting to paint my own image, then scrape away, wash away or cover up feels like a necessary process in figuring out my own artistic direction.
‘Nothing’ has forced me to create something after many years of creating nothing.