Art has left the Building
Re:Call Interview
1) When were you at Bournville School of Art?
2006-2010
2) What course did you study here?
I did the Foundation course (2006-7) and the
BA (Hons) Visual Arts by Negotiated Study (2007-2010).
3) Who were your tutors?
Penny Mason, Linda Matti, Kevin Harley, Sean
O’Keeffe, Ruth Claxton, Stuart Whipps, Jo Newman, Steve Bulcock, Sally Harper
briefly.
4) What area did you specialize in?
Documentary
5) What memories do you have of your first day
at Bournville School of Art?
Tom Jones (not the singer) who was head of the school at the time gave
us each an envelope of visual reminders to help us remember his five big
suggestions to us in approaching our art studies. He said we always had to
question everything everyone said (including ourselves) about what we’re doing
and how we’re doing it. And there are patterns everywhere in nature so remember
to look out for the patterns. And I’ve forgotten the rest and I can’t remember
what was in the envelope to help us remember.
6) What memories do you have of your final
show at Bournville School of Art?
Stuart Whipps telling me he liked my work. Sean O’Keeffe telling me he
loved my work. Me feeling a deep resonating significance to my very being.
Which took a few years to wear off. Feeling triumphant because I’d finished
something worthwhile for the first time at the age of 32, and it was something
that felt like it had been there all my life just waiting to get out. Feeling
vindicated.
7) What piece did you do for your final show
at Bournville and could you describe it?
It was a 25-minute documentary called Dawn, which was a sort of
real-life fable centering around my friendship with my wingman Tim, featuring
home-made music and home movies (Ruth Claxton asked me what I meant by “home
movies” at my final assessment and I didn’t really know and I’m still a bit
vague but I reckon you feel it when you see it). Tim’s been my creative mentor
and co-conspirator since before I started at Bournville and appears in all my
films (he’s the first person you see in
the film I’ve entered for Art Has Left The Building). Dawn was an
attempt to describe this weird other-worldly experience I had where everything
around me synchronized with everything inside me and I got all sorts of epiphanies
and knew the universe and me were one and the same entity. Which is how I got
obsessed with synchronicity (see question 10).
8) Could you give just five words to describe
your experience at Bournville School of Art?
Demystifying. Breathing space. Piffany Path.
9) Could you indicate what creative activity
you have done since your time at Bournville?
Made these films:
Birmingham Welcomes the Conservative Party
(2011) 5mins
In Memory of a Free Festival (2011) 36mins
Tim Makes Jarbies (2012) 11mins
The Legends of Doctor Rock (2012) 39mins
And been filming a couple more with the
intention of editing them at some point (see question 12).
I’ve put on a number of screenings at some pubs in Digbeth and Moseley
and the Ort café in Balsall Heath, and Birmingham Welcomes the Conservative
Party got shown at the mac as part of an exhibition where everyone could submit
work to be shown in changing exhibitions each week. It got picked one week at
the last minute because the riots happened and it became vaguely topical
because it features a lot of angry people venting their political rage on the
streets of Birmingham and a lot of police trying to contain them.
10) Could you describe your current creative practice/ideas/work?
I’ve been building up a collection of documentaries inspired by my
experiences of my life in my community, and underpinned by an urge to broadcast
a more meaningful angle on reality than the heavy rationalised normality of the
media bombardment I was raised on, which so much clouded my vision as I was
growing up that I didn’t start to see any beauty around me until my mid-20s,
when I stopped watching telly. Gradually I’ve phased out newspapers too. I have
to tune out the admass* so I can see the harmonious unity of the whole of
creation behind the mass consciousness mask.
Since the first film I made, Synchronicity: In Search of the Unus
Mundus**, I’ve held deep-seated aspirations to make a film that proves the
existence of… … … … a force at work in the universe which I’m still trying to
figure out what it is. I call it the unus mundus, for the sake of argument. In
that film I hoped to be able to catch it red-handed, in the act of working its
harmony through meaningful coincidences, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d
imagined and while I was convinced of the evidence I don’t think anyone else
was. This original motivation still preoccupies me however and I’ve continued
to investigate synchronicities in the making of my films, even though synchronicity
itself is no longer the main subject.
11) Could you say a little about the work you
have chosen to include in the Re:Call exhibition?
In Memory of a Free Festival was a gift from the unus mundus, and from
Synchronicity Dave, a friend of mine who first appeared in Synchronicity: In
Search of the Unus Mundus.
Dave got the idea to have us an organic unorganized community festival
on Moseley Bog for the summer solstice the year after I graduated. The idea was
to just spread the word around and let it spontaneously happen, whoever came
and whatever we brought with us would just self-organise and make whatever it
would make, without anyone directing it. I anticipated it as an experiment with
the unus mundus – I would just turn up and follow where I felt it drawing
(through) me, believing totally that it would reveal itself in the love of the
people gathered and the unity of what I caught.
When I woke up the morning after the festival I thought I’d failed. When
it came to editing it slotted together in such a harmoniously neat way that
little by little I became elated as if I had harnessed the power of unus mundus
connection my very self.
12) What are you working on at the moment?
Myself. I’ve realized I’ve just been pissing about with the unus mundus
up to now and I need to do some major work on my soul before anything else.
But also… very slowly working with Tim on editing In Memory of a Free
Festival 2 – we tried to have another festival a year after the original. It’s
much darker than
the first one. It may not be suitable for public release. And I’m gradually filming some new stories to
make into films; one about a man who’s been giving away free cooked food every
Tuesday next to St Mary’s church in Moseley for nearly two years, and the other
about a band called the Army of the Broken Hearted who I randomly encountered
in an alleyway and then realized the lead singer was this significant outtake
character from my earlier work on Synchronicity and his songwriting is devastatingly
awesome commentary on the soulless mass consciousness of the times we are
living in.
13) What are your creative plans for the
future?
Waiting and seeing.
14) Is there anything else you would like to
add?
Footnotes
* admass:
“Admass is my name for the whole system of increasing productivity, plus
inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high pressure advertising and
salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the
creation of the mass mind, the mass man.” (JB Priestley, Journey Down a
Rainbow)
** unus mundus:
“a deeper reality that connects mind and mind, and mind and matter”
(Ervin Lazslo, Subtle Connections: Psi, Grof, Jung and the Quantum Vacuum)
“Unus mundus, Latin for “One world,” is a term which refers to the
concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and
returns to. It was popularized by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, though the
term was used as early as the sixteenth century by Gerhard Dorn, a student of
the famous alchemist Paracelsus. “Jung’s concepts of the archetype and
synchronicity are related to the unus mundus, the archetype being an expression
of unus mundus; synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence,” being made possible
by the fact that both the observer and connected
event ultimately stem from the same source, the unus mundus.”
(Wikipedia)
“Synchronicity involves a
connection between inner psychological experience and outer experiences in the
world, where the connection is acausal in the sense that the inner experience
cannot have been an efficient cause of the outer experience, or vice versa. In
short, synchronicity is a meaningful, acausal connection between
inner and outer events. Because the phenomenon of synchronicity involves
an acausal coordination of the inner and outer worlds in a meaningful way, it
is not exclusively a psychological or physical phenomenon, but is “psychoid”
meaning that it somehow essentially involves both psyche and matter. Thus, Jung
interpreted
synchronicity to imply the existence of an extremely profound level of
reality prior to any distinction between psyche and matter. In other words,
synchronicity phenomena represent a manifestation in consciousness of psychoid
structures present in the depths of a transcendental unitary reality Jung
called the unus mundus.”
(Thomas J MacFarlane, Quantum Physics, Depth Psychology and Beyond)