My Final Year of Uni

The idea I have for displaying the video of my brother is to have it on a monitor with a set of headphones that the viewer can put on and sit and listen to it. I want the viewer to display it like this because it is a very personal thing that he is sharing, therefor I wanted it to be a more intimate thing rather then displaying it on a projection with the sound really loud. This way they will really focus and listen to him more, the viewer will connect to it more and then hopefully the emotion will be felt.

I got the idea for displaying it in this way from Tracey Emin’s piece of work titled ‘A Conversation With My Mum’. (pictured above) In this piece she video’s her and her mum have a conversation where Emin asks her mum very personal questions. She displayed the video on a small monitor on a small table top- like stand, with two sets of headphones and two wooden chairs (a bit like dinning table chairs) for the viewers to sit on and watch the video. I have always like this idea, that the people watching the video really are forced to engaged with it, and also I think it is interesting how the viewers are almost sitting in a similar situation to Emin and her mum who are on the video, and sitting on household chairs which also relates to the feeling of a home, an inviting environment.

I created a video of my brother, Taylor talking to the camera about what happened in Zante. I filmed him at our home to make him feel comfortable, and then set the camera up on a tripod and left the room while he talked about it. There were three separate videos of him, but I have now edited them and put them together so it is just one video. I am very pleased with the video and how it came out, it is very emotional for me hearing him talk about it even though I’ve already heard all about it before. It was a very hard thing for him to do, and his emotion really comes across in the video, the reason why there is three separate videos is because he had to stop twice because he got emotional and said he didn’t want to cry on camera. There is a particular bit of the event that he didn’t really go into much detail about, and that is the moment when he was hiding up a tree after being beaten with a pole, and he couldn’t see out of one of his eyes. This was the most traumatic part for him, because he thought that the men were going to find him and hurt him again, he has had reoccurring nightmares about it, and was the reason he couldn’t sleep properly for months. He has talked to me about everything that happened and how he felt, but he finds it’s very difficult to talk on video about it. The most memorable thing that he has ever told me about that night was how got out of the tree and was running towards the main street and he fell down a hill, and he said at that moment he thought to him self I’m not going to make it, I’m going to die.

The aim of this video is that the person watching it feels the emotion, and that there is a sort of understanding of the emotional trauma that he went through.

He talks on the video about how he felt really angry after for a long while, and still does now, this is something that I want to portray in another piece of work, but I am not sure on how to do this yet. I also want to have a piece of work to show how broken and helpless he felt in this whole situation.

What I also still want to do is video me, my mum and my dad talking about our experience of the whole thing because equally we felt helpless in the sense that we were in England and there was nothing we could do.

Other photos which i might include are photos of taylor at the hospital in England when he had surgery on his face, and the CT scan of his face.

Sticking to the theme of emotion, i wanted to explore emotions in this project, through photography and video and maybe even text.
I had been looking at Jeremy Deller’s work over the summer, and I like how he used an event, something that had happened in the past, something controversial, and then used this to create emotion to the viewer. For example, in the Battle of Orgreave where he created the a re-enactment from the miners strike, where the miners are being chased and beaten my policemen, and also in ‘It Is What It Is’ where Deller travelled around America with an american solider and an Iraqi citizen towing a car that had been blown up in bagdad in a suicide bombing, and invited people to talk about Iraq.
He is bringing something up for discussion, conversation, but also the work creates such a variety of different emotions, making some viewers feel angry, sad etc. This emotion provoking is something which i wanted to work with so I decided to take an event from my life which was particularly emotional and use it to create a piece of work and portray an emotion to the viewer.

The event I am working with:
On Friday 21st August at about 05:00am I woke up to a phone call from my brother who was on holiday with 3 of his friends in Laganas, Zante. The phone call consisted of a very drunk, scared and hysterical Taylor who was crying down the phone telling me that he needed help, that he had been beaten with poles by some serbian men in an alley and that i needed to get my dad.
Luckily enough he had managed to get himself to the medical centre, but he was alone. I managed to get hold of his friend charlie, who ran straight down the the medical centre and stayed by Taylors side.
All day friday i was constantly on the phone to different hospitals as he was transferred from place to place having scans and x-rays.
He had to have scans on his head to check for brain damaged or any injuries to his head, but luckily enough that was all fine. Then we were told that he had broken his Eye-socket, jaw, nose, and hand.
Mum and dad flew out to be with him the next day, but there were only two seats on the plane, which meant that i had to stay at home.
The thought of the four of us being split up made me feel sick, but i just wanted to get my brother home. Mum kept getting upset and i kept telling her, don’t worry about me, just get taylor home safe, thats all that matters.
While they were over there they were told that Taylor could come home on his scheduled flight sunday, so then i had the task of trying to find a way to get mum and dad home. There were no flights, i was stressing out, i thought they were going to be stuck there. Then they went and sat at Zante airport and waited for a cancellation for a flight to anywhere in england. Luckily enough they both managed to get on a flight in England.
I picked my brother up for the airport and the minute i see his face as he walked out i nearly cried, such a relief. I got him in the car about to drive home and i remember thinking ‘Im never leaving you again’

Using this as a basis, I want to look at the emotions felt by each of us, my mum, my dad, me and my brother, i want to interview them and have their version of the story and how they felt. i then had the idea of videoing each of us and displaying them on four monitors side by side at the same time, thinking of the likes of Bruce Naumans work, where the videos are played at the same time, causing the audio to all get mixed up, then creating a feeling of anxiousness, which is the feeling we all had when it happened. It was a hectic and crazy time and I want to get this across to the viewer. I also want to incorporate some of the photos from the incident, maybe as a separate piece of work on a slide show with taylor speaking over the top of them on audio.
I would also like to really look at taylors story to what happened and how he felt when he was actually beaten up, and maybe portray the fear he felt in a piece of work, but I’m not sure how i will do this yet.

This is one of the images i might use:

Last year my work was based around boxing. I am a competitive amateur boxer, and this is a massive part of my life outside of uni, so I decided to incorporate this passion with my other passion which is art. I was basically using video, and created shot videos which I projected into a dark space. These videos were all in black and white, this is just a preference of mine, I prefer photos and video to be in black and white rather then in full colour. I also think that when you are looking at movement, and what is actually going on in the footage, colour can sometimes distract, and take the viewers attention away. So to put it in black and white I feel simplifies it. Most of the work I did mainly focused on videos of me, looking at movement, and I also created prints, where I inked my gloves up and punched a white piece of card, and then inked the soles of my boots up and skipped and shadow boxed onto the card. Then I moved away from me being the subject and looked at another boxer at my club. I went away to the national quarter finals as a coach for this boy in my club Milo Clay, and unfortunately he lost. When he got back into the changing rooms I then videoed him. He was devastated, and he just sat there and cried. This piece of work was such a powerful piece of footage, this then became the main piece for my project which I played in slow motion. This project then moved away from the idea of movement and boxing and moved more into the theme of emotions, and capturing emotions. What I really liked about this piece was that it sparked emotion in the viewer and created a real deep sadness, because the emotion portrayed in the video was so intense, and was authentic, it was the real thing.