Research & Inspiration
For my initial ideas for this assignment, I was focused on expanding on my ideas of home that I’ve been playing with outside of class.
Initial ideas:
When I lived in Meanjin, particularly just before I left, I was focusing a lot on the feeling of home and what makes home. An excerpt from a previous journal entry reads:
‘The concept of home is very sacred to me. Imagining people who once occupied the spaces around you, especially if those are people you have loved or have lost, makes me feel so peaceful… It makes me feel safe to know their love is around me. In the walls. In the streets and footpaths around here, their ghosts linger.’
Now after moving, I am excited to continue focusing on these feelings within my practice. Obviously I am not in Meanjin and I cannot create work surrounding the exact places that have sentimental value to myself. Instead I am going to create a work about the gentle familiarity that settles and grows when you live somewhere ~ how even the smallest routines root you in a place. I’m also interested in the soft ache of transition from one place to another ~ the subtle, lingering grief of leaving, and the quiet anticipation of arriving somewhere new. This work will trace the in-between space of movement—how home can feel like a rhythm, and how that rhythm shifts when you begin again.
These ideas will be realised through notions of rituals and repetition, focusing on methodical, often unnoticed cyclical tasks that we use to structure our days. Like locking the door, making dinner or tea, doing facial masks or skincare routines, folding laundry ~ these acts become sacred in their constancy. Through creating a ‘day in the life’ shaped by these rituals, I want to reflect on how they become markers of time and belonging, even in temporary places.
This piece will act as a kind of emotional map—one that charts both the comfort of the everyday and the quiet disorientation of change.
Inspirations:
Particularly I am interested in Phillip Brophy, specifically ‘Evaporated Music 1’. I hope to take from this piece, the abstract, distorted noises compared to the tasks being completed. I am also interested in this piece as the editing is fast and sudden, echoing the matching abstract noises. I think it would be interesting experiment within the speed of the piece as well.
Other Visual References:
The photographer Ladyist often depicts soft house scenes, specifically involving women and suburban routines.
In the same vein, routines depicted in film & tv, girlhood depicted within magazines.
Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig ~ Lady Bird, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Little Miss Sunshine.
Rookie Magazine ~ Tavi Gevieson, Petra Collins.
Juno Calypso, Petrina Hicks, Maisie Cousins, Lilia Li-Mi-Yan, Rania Matar, Molly Soda, Alexandra Marzella.
Another inspo was given to me by the feedback from Clare.
‘Great work Lina, I think the ideas you're exploring are fantastic and really pertinent. You've got heaps of great references already, but you might like to look at Janine Antoni's work, she's done a lot of bodily performance and also investigated the idea of domestic life for women’
Janine Antoni created the piece ‘Inhabit’. The description of the piece is as follows:
In Inhabit, Antoni turns her attention to the complex role of mothering. After years of exploring her relationship to her family and most specifically to her mother, Antoni now focuses on herself in this role. Embracing the necessity of shape–shifting to accommodate this position, the artist renders herself half–spider, half–hermit crab. It is unclear whether her body is suspended or ascending: whether or not she is entrapped or the structure of support. On closer inspection it is clear that she is holding space for a very delicate creation.
This image has heavily inspired my video work. Within my assignment I was already experimenting with the idea of sitting within an actual doll-house ~ to have an physical depiction of my body within the home. It will be a more physical representation of what my work is trying to say.
I have always love the imagery of Alice in Wonderland where she grows into the pink house and she sits within it. So for my work I got my hands on an actual doll house, which I will sit within so I am able to sit within it as well.
Reflections & Tests
Initial tests:
First reflection on my test footage:
Although I think that there will be similar shots within my final work, these are a lot less considered and careful than my finals would be. For example, the auto focus being left on, the camera being visible in one of the mirrors, the pacing of the clips and audio, etc. It is just a lot less intentional than I vision the final being. Although I am interested in the footage that’s been shot here, and the contents, I just think it could be a whole lot better. I am interested now in creating audio on top of similar imagery, and splicing it together with other rituals, to create the final piece.
After shooting test footage and reviewing artists I’ve sited as inspiration, I realise I am quite interested in these tasks as a feminist meditation within domestic space as well as documenting the soft familiarity of home. It feels that I am unable to make this work, living as a feminine presenting person, with myself completing mundane tasks around the house, previously culturally relegated to being ‘women’s work’, without having commentary about the domestic space and my gender. It feels important to touch on! Maybe I would need more time to iron these ideas slowly into my initial writings, but it could potentially be myself using the domestic space as a quiet space for selfhood. Perhaps reclaiming domesticity as a place of gentle care and ritual? My body is the home?
