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Not much later though, I am looking forward to putting this together, I am just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit and then we will have fishy mayhem. There will be death and destruction galore and I will film it all.
For new readers of this blog I am not really about to indulge in a bit of fish assisted homicide, for even though he is very grumpy I am rather fond of The Spouse.
I am talking about the film I said I was going to make during my creative concept development class.
I have discovered that there is a little bit more to making a film than grabbing a video camera, shooting some vision and sticking it all together in a watchable format.
I have discovered that the practice vision that I shot will suddenly take on a life of its own and demand to be shown as a short film instead.
I have discovered that I really, really enjoy film making. My poor Nikon still camera has been slightly neglected in favour of a second hand video camera and I have been hoovering up vision left, right and centre.
Yesterday we all had to present our work to our teacher Glen Dunn and our colleagues. I wasn’t prepared for how nervous I felt presenting my short film to my class. I am cheerful, outgoing, opinionated, wisecracking and flippant. I am also intensely private which is a bit of a contradiction as I am a gregarious show off with theatrical tendencies. I rarely get nervous, stressed yes, nervous no.
My ceramic work is what it is.
All my emotional energy goes into the clay and afterwards I am drained. Even though my artist statements are usually quite emotional, my inner thoughts aren’t really out there on display next to my pots.
With this first film I made I was giving people a glimpse into myself. I was really sharing what I see in an unambiguous manner and I think that I was so nervous because I really wanted people to like what I had done. As opposed to my ceramic work where I just want people to respond to my work and I am not really fussed whether people like the work or not.
I am sure that I will get over it though and soon my film work will be the same as my ceramic work, where the response is enough, but it was interesting to analyse my feelings towards this first film.
Anyhow enough babble. I have uploaded the film to Vimeo. This is the first draft, is that the right terminology? Do films have drafts or edits?
This is the first version of my first film. Drive.
I am interested in what you think about it.
Drive from Kim Foale on Vimeo.
It just goes ahead and does its own thing, skipping merrily along any number of tangential paths, spinning off in any direction it likes while the logical side of me gets very grumpy waiting for my brain to behave itself.
I can not explain to you properly how Amy’s sensory processing issues affect her because when Veronica explains Amy’s difficulties to me my brain misbehaves and wanders off into a ceramic daydream and I only process bits of the information. It is bloody annoying.
It was the same when Mum was dying. We needed to go to all the appointments as a threesome because both Mum and I relied on Veronica to remember all the information and then pass it back to us, sometimes Veronica had to repeat herself numerous times before it all sunk in. When Mum was in palliative care the doctor was showing us an X-ray of Mum’s shoulder and talking about the cancer in her bones and all I could see, was that the line of Mum’s rib cage would make a very nice shape on a large pot. *sigh*
As I understand it Amy sees her world very differently, it is like she is in a room with a hundred televisions all turned up as loud as they can go and all on different channels. The world screams its information at Amy and she cant handle it very well.
I don’t think that I would handle it very well either.
That is how I feel today, all blurred and mimsy. Yesterday I felt shattered, emotionally shattered and I missed my mother with an intensity that had me weeping at inopportune moments. It must be quite disconcerting to see a woman weeping into the oranges at the greengrocers.
Amy is being assessed by the early intervention people and she has some sensory processing issues. Veronica will write about this in due course and I wont go into detail other than to say the news reduced me to tears. I see a bright future for my grand daughter as she will be a strong, talented and determined woman but I also know that her time at school wont be easy and that makes me unbearably sad.
My gifted and intelligent youngest child has taken under-achieving at school to a whole new level. His school report is almost a carbon copy of mine at the same age and I worry about my son.
The spouse is as grumpy as usual, though he smiles and pulls me towards him for a hug when I take my teeth out and pull old lady faces at him.
The dog has rolled in roadkill this morning, thoughtfully filling the house with the delicate bouquet of putrefying possum. I am trying to ignore the persistent whining at the backdoor and I wish it would hurry up and warm up a bit so I can hose the dog down without us both risking hypothermia.
This Sunday the 15th of August is the opening of the Tas Ceramics Society’s annual exhibition. It is being held at the Rosny School house Gallery and will run until the 5th of September. I have two pieces in this exhibition and I will post some photos later on in the week as I forgot to take any before I delivered the pieces to the gallery. *doh*
Making a film is an incredibly time consuming and eye straining job. I really underestimated just how much work was involved and so I have temporarily postponed the zombie, mutant fish gorefest. I am working on a project using vision that my son and I shot while we have been driving through the Brighton bypass road works.
I have finished my three week sculpture block and it has been a delight to work with Belinda Winkler. Thanks to the ideas that Belinda shared I am going to make some quite large dragon eggs for installation at Chauncy Vale and I will publish photos of the sculptures once they are fired.
I cant decide which of these images I like best so I have published them both.
I have never regretted the hours I spent lying in the dirt with my small daughter watching ants drag sugar into their nests. Or the time holding my small son’s hand as we followed lizard tracks and hatched our own butterflies from cocoons.
The housework would always be there nagging at me but the lizard tracks were fragile and urgent. Time spent chasing fairies and feathers on the wind is always better than time spent shaking a toddler off your leg as you do the dishes.
When the spouse would roar at me about the mess, I would roar back and slam the door on the offending room and declare that it was fixed. I would try desperately to make him understand that the housework would always be there forever but that the wind was covering the lizard tracks and that small children needed to lie on their backs in the sand and look for dragons in the clouds.
In the spirit of hope and desperation I applied to do ceramics at the art school in 1991. They applauded my enthusiasm and kindly suggested that maybe a bit more of a background in ceramics rather than a couple of adult ed courses would serve my cause better and my application was declined.
I went home and put my dreams away and immersed myself in the business of raising my children and building my home. I was incredibly lonely but I only had so much energy to spare and I needed that energy for myself.
When the lonliness and frustration overwhelmed me I would rage at the night, I would howl at the moon, I would stand in the middle of ferocious thunderstorms and dare the lightning to strike me and when I emerged unscathed from the storm, I would drink some more.
I couldn’t afford proper materials, so I painted the carpet, the doonas, my clothes, the door of the bus and each time the spouse came home he growled his disapproval of the paint and the mess and I would want to vanish into thin air. My children were my anchor and I would walk barefoot in the garden until the energy of the earth soothed my soul.
I was 25 when I applied to do ceramics at the Art school and I was 39 when I eventually returned to clay.
In those rare moments when I experience regret I sometimes wonder where I would be today if I had persevered with my dream of going to uni and then as I read my daughter’s words or listen to my son’s music, I know that I chose the right path at the time and that there is a proper time for everything.
Here are some photos of the newest dragon eggs.
