A year is both a very short time and an incredibly long one. I created this piece while continuing to experiment with making videos from photographs and digital images. It wasn’t my first attempt. The first was made from photographs of my family and friends, including people who have since passed away.
At the time, my thoughts had become a little morbid. I had been looking at the work of so many artists, and so many of them used art as an outlet for pain, grief or anger. It began to affect the way I was thinking outside university as well. I found myself longing to see art that didn’t need to carry a heavy meaning, art that was simply beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.
Looking back at this video now, I would add many more frames to make the circular movement much smoother and less jerky. Like many university projects, I was working to a deadline, and by that point I had already changed the concept so many times that I was simply tired of it.
My original idea came from a dream. I watched the Earth being created, mountains rising and falling before I was suddenly pulled away into space, alone, cradled by the galaxy and drifting through an endless sea of stars. It was a dream that stayed with me long after I woke, and I began creating drawings that I blended into an animated film. Unfortunately, my tutors felt the project should move in a different direction. In the end, I realised I simply didn’t have the time to create the vision I had imagined in a way that would have satisfied me.
One of the biggest adjustments I had to make at AUP was accepting that your first idea is rarely the one you are encouraged to pursue. Tutors continually challenged us to question, dismantle and reshape our concepts until they became almost unrecognisable from where they had started.
Was that a good thing or a bad thing? From a learning perspective, it was undoubtedly valuable. It forced me to explore possibilities I would never have considered on my own. Yet I still feel a sense of loss for the artwork that never came into being because those original ideas were abandoned along the way.
I will admit that I was never entirely convinced by this approach, and I am probably still a little salty about it. I don’t necessarily believe the outcome is always better than the original idea; often it is simply different. What I can say, though, is that the process taught me not to settle for my first thought. It encouraged me to question my decisions, to consider alternatives and to think much more deeply about my work before I committed to making it. That lesson has stayed with me, even if I still occasionally wonder what might have happened had I been allowed to recreate the dream.
Cheryl Nelson Costumes 