Through Lorenzo’s SLP tasks, making performance as informed by listed ingredients, I developed a site-specific video project filmed around the QM campus, starting in Arts One, then spanning out towards the canal and student village.

I documented stills of plants and flowers in their varying degrees and stages - from plants growing in the foyer, to the allotment, to the trees along Regents Canal. The mixture of growth through both manufactured and natural means created a really beautiful array to be explored.

One of Lorenzo’s prompts was ‘something that can’t be faked’, which I brought into my clips of plants being affected by their surroundings - namely in contact with wind and external factors. The unpredictability of what will happen to them was interesting to record, allowing nature to take its course in more ways than one.

Another prompt was the ‘revelation of space’, which became clearer as I ventured outside of the building, into the wider campus. As a replication of journey, growth, and expansion - my chosen focal points within the film grew and progressed as the plants did/continue to do.

Within Julia Bardsley’s artist workshop, we went through the processes of physicalising our projects, and channeling the energies and manifestations they produce.

Using Chekhov’s psychological gestures - we drew from written prompts we had produced in impulse response to our projects, taking inspiration and physicalising it. In moving with the internal gesture, and allowing it to consume your movements entirely, it becomes a state of being separate to the self. Through this gesture, it can be channelled into decision-making capacities, producing outcomes unimaginable from the initial starting point.

The idea of ritual enables the treatment of something as sacred and almost becomes performing a routine. Building a persona in this way allows for self-censorship to give way and generate new material.

Whilst we were using another person as a mirror, getting ‘ready’ in the reflection of another, we were informed by our own internal gestures - their desires, their impulses. Outsourcing the generation to the persona. However, in the process of serving as a mirror FOR another person, somehow their physical projection onto us still fed into our own personas. You begin to make sense of any occurrence, and apply logic to make it a part of the gestural world.

I am really interested in the process of BECOMING - the journey of transformation, the feeling that comes with the transformation. In how the internal translated itself into material reality. How finding the point of internal concentration can enable so much intrinsic potential.

In discussions post-workshop, we spoke about the value and the interesting parts being how the internal gesture is translated - rather than necessarily looking at the reference points, and where this internal concentration stems from.

• interrogation through PRACTICE

• focus on the process of becoming - how does it feel?

• finding the internal point of concentration, and using this to inform decisions, actions, reactions, making material

• let the persona create! outsource

• something about the ways the colours blend on the makeup wipes, process of unmasking, shedding the persona, the return/reverse journey of transformation

• sometimes, it’s more interesting to think about the ways in which things manifest, the processes and rituals undertaken, rather than where something has come from. the stimulus, and explaining the reasons and meanings, are not always as fascinating as the essence of what is being created.

CONTINUES

HAS NO END DATE

IS IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS PROCESS AT THE TIME OF ‘SHOWING’

IS AFFECTED BY THE WORLD AROUND IT

IS UNPREDICTABLE

CANNOT BE MANUFACTURED ENTIRELY, JUST PROMPTED