Experimental/ElasticTime

Initial Ideas

The spine of my project was developed through being a young trans person in a society that seems to demonise the my community. I’ve been eager to work on a project that could speak to an audience that feels isolated, whilst educating others of the reality of being trans.

The project topic was elastic time and I interpreted this a little differently than if it was just time. Elasticity made me think of something malleable, stretchy, as though as students we could jump back and forth with time as something unilinear. I liked this idea and began to think about how my life, as a trans person, has always felt like I was lagging behind but also sprinting forward for years and only moving a few inches, along with so many other contradicting feelings. I wondered if any of my trans peers felt something similar. I began to map these ideas, getting everything out of my head and chaotically onto paper.

After I had a few mindmaps and interview questions complete, I began some basic research. This research involved looking at a number of artists that work with understanding or ripping apart time, along with gallery’s that are platforming these artists. I also jotted down some experiments I could complete and a number of words to keep me focused. I find making notes of words that pop out to me during my research process extremely helpful. This is because I typically find my head wondering off to a variety of subtopics under my main idea and going completely off track. These words are usually a general structure, allowing me space to adventure towards different experiments but on the same line.

Experiments

When completing the visualisation workshop, I made a quick video of people walking. Because I was on the third floor, the camera picked up the different levels and you would watch people walk on the ground floor, disappear and then come back into eye sight on the first floor. It interested me and I began fascinated by movement and time in collaboration. This brought about my first experiment, the static running.

I found videos of different prey animals and took screenshots of the core movements. I then traced over these images using a charcoal pencil, adding the inbetweens when the running of the animal looked stiff.

I then added each of these frames together by scanning them through a printer to create a sort of static running between each animal. I knew I wanted the change of animals to start big to small, creating this feeling that the oldest of the trans community are always rooted behind young trans people and kids, seeped into our history and creating so many stepping stones in our futures. This idea was furthered by watching the documentary on Marsha P. Johnston and Sylvia Rivera.

My next experiment was working with animals and movement again but seeing if I could create more dynamic transitions. I worked solely with the heads and tried a number of different ideas.

After visiting the national history museum, I realised I wanted to incorporate signs of nature and the abstract shapes within it. I have always found spores and the growing of mould to be interesting, along with trees and the way light finds its way through its structure. I like the number of abstract layers and the inherent life each of them contain, as though they’re breathing.

From this I began to use my line work, created digitally, to develop different abstract shapes. Drawing the first frame was easy, I knew what I wanted to draw and coming up with ideas wasn’t hard, however, making those shapes and lines move was. Each frame was becoming increasingly more difficult and whenever I played it back, it looked stiff and out of place. The further I got into this experiment, I realised it didn’t fit into what I was trying to display anyways and so I started branching out to other ways I could use these digital sketches and pull more from them, as it felt too flat.

Moving away from digital media, I decided to print out each frame, sketch the outline onto paper and cut them out individually. In previous projects, I favoured using a paper cutting knife due to its delicacy and how human the results always looked.

I really like digital media, I use it constantly but I believe that with this experiment and project, I needed something that couldn’t be replicated through digital tools, human errors. Making mistakes digitally, I can always undo or erase and have a clean slate but some of my favourite pieces have been ‘mistakes’. So I stepped away and in the end, loved the results.

I had a few ideas of what I wanted to place behind the cut out, most being elements within nature but in the end it looked too chaotic with my background. This clash forced me to look at brighter colours and opted to using a similar colour palette to a different experiment that I was doing side by side with this one. I grabbed a few different paints and created a backdrop, taking photos of each frame and putting them together in procreate.

This experiment was inspired by the series Yellow Jackets and the constant symbolising of a deer head. Whilst its meaning in the show is different that what I intended for my project, I favoured the repetitiveness of the animal and how it felt like it was trying to tell you something. I wanted my work to converse the same message. From this I began obtaining different angles of a deer head, most found through old scientific drawings. I wanted the deer to start looking down, away from the audience and slowly reveal itself, facing us head on.

My first experiment started with the photographs of three core angles and working digitally to fill in the inbetweens. This went extremely well, I made the antlers move in a odd and beautifully disturbing way in an attempt to draw the audience towards the visual in front of them.

I then printed each of the frames out and traced them using black chalk. I liked the outline but the paper lacked a fundamental aspect, chaos. I spontaneously sharped my chalk on top of my paper and rolled a heavy tube over it, creating these little indents of flavour. I repeated this step, each frame different from one another but this nice noise coming through on each one.

I scanned each of them through the printer and inverted the colour, before putting them together in procreate.

My previous experiment working with the inspiration of mould spores and abstract shapes in nature didn’t work very well, so I tried again.

I started by taking photos at the national history museum of different spores.

From this, I came upon the idea of growth and plants sprouting. But I also knew I wanted to keep the theme of animals, so I created a ram sat on a chair becoming engulfed by the plant.

I created a rough draft of the plant animation and intended to take these frames to traditional media. It was a very simple process of drawing the end image and working to create a moving image. Once this was complete, I drew the ram character. Taking inspiration from model poses and photos of rams online. Bringing these two elements together, I had both the plant and the ram but I was not completely content with the finished outcome. It once again, looked forced and misplaced. But overall it was the fact I could not emotionally connect with it. I had fun working with movement but ultimately chose not to include it within my work.

The next couple of experiments worked around photography I had taken. My subject matters were animals, nature and my trans friends.

The first photograph was taken with the intention of capturing the multilayers of branches in winter. How exposed they are to other elements like the sun or the sky seeping through gaps.

I really liked the colour contrasts and how there’s pinches of sky in the background. I had no ideas on how I wanted to utilise this image, I just knew I liked it.

The next two photographs were taken with the intention of capturing trans people in everyday life, in an attempt to humanise a person who has so openly been villainised

Sometimes when I see news articles or social media headlines that target trans people as though we are ruining the lives of young people and children, that we are confused or dangerous, I feel like screaming that we are human too. That I like to collect rocks that I think are pretty and I move snails off the sidewalks so they don’t get hurt. That my boyfriend loves a camera walk with his dad and finds vast amounts of comfort in a sunset. We aren’t evil, we are just trying to live as happily as we can. My aim was to try and take photographs of moments were i felt my people were just existing.

My last photography experiment involved taking photographs of animals eyes, ones that had undergone taxidermy.

I have always felt so much discomfort from taxidermy. I believe it takes vast talent and delicacy to get right but does it make my feel unease? Yes. So I tried to pull this element forward.

Aiming to take these photos and layered them on top of one another, the eyes meeting each other. How lifeless and empty each one is to mark the deaths of so many trans people. It was difficult to always get a clear shot, because there was lighting and glass in the way and some animals were so far away that my very small point and shoot wasn’t capable of what I was so desperately begging it to do.

This experiment turned out so well, every person I have shown it to has had the exact response I wanted. I really favoured the overlapping and the repetition of the eyes.

It was uneasy to take photos of and work with, usually I would turn away from it and try cover my eyes, rather than approach it head on but honestly most of this project was approaching things that make me uncomfortable or sad. But I knew that if I wanted to tell this story and tell it well, I had to keep moving even with such heavy topics.

Sticking on the liens of deer, I collaborated with Jay Walls and worked from photography he had taken of two wild deer. I became interested in this photo because the first deer is in the foreground in contrast to the second deer that seems to camouflage. I wanted to use this to try convey that whilst one trans person may feel they are so desperately behind, there’s another person behind them that dreams of what they have. We keep chasing this unachievable goal and its so tiring that we forget to acknowledge how far we have come.

I worked digitally to black out the first deer and them on another frame black both out. I messed with the timing of each frame, holding one drastically longer than the other.

I liked what I had created so I took to trying to replicate this feeling using white ink and textured paper but I didn’t like the outcome as much as I did the digital creation. I think this is because the digital looked lighter and more included in the photograph. When I took this experiment to traditional mediums, the animation looked out of touch.

Regardless I kept trying, messing with editing and colour lays. Creating something that in the end I was happy with.

My last experiment was done quickly and with very limited thought processing. I always knew that I wanted my title to be something on the lines of transformation and since I have been working with the changing of animals I began to do word research and came across metamorphosis.

I wrote the word on a piece of paper, it looked very messy and scratchy and then began to add noise in whatever way I could. At this point in my project I was tired and I was not wanting to create. I had listened to a number of audios that were distressing and felt personal. Whilst I should have taken a break, as I had managed my time very well and had space to take a minute away, I didn’t. It turned out for the best too because the introduction seemed fuelled by my anger and distress. I sprayed the paper with water, took at it with a cutting knife and stabbed my pencil to make markings. I then sharped my charcoal pencil over the top to add this odd sprinkle effect. I did however scrape so much that the word was no longer literate and so I wrote the rest of the word on a ripped piece of paper and made a stop-motion of the paper moving into frame.