Dee Matthews – Week 1

Books and Research

These are my book choices for my pre-term research on ‘The Everyday’ and endless discussions with my family. The Everyday edited by Stephen Johnstone now has a plethora of highlights and note stickers (don’t panic I bought it secondhand) of the other books it’s The Art of the Everyday the Quotidian in Postwar French Culture edited by Lynn Gumpert that I adored and gave me ideas how to incorporate the experience of my own family within my ideas for this work. Talking with a Map by Steve Potter left me in no doubt about where I would start.

It became clear that ‘The Everyday’ for me was wrestling (key word there) with my everyday pain. Before I could do anything I had to work around that, to manage it so I can do anything including my art practice.

My other Quotidian was perversely talking about filmmaking with my son. It seems that for 6 years there has been a daily conversation about the techniques, and the creative soul searching of my son’s filmmaking life not always an easy or at times understandable conversation.

I made short picture films in year one. Indeed, it had been the exploration of portraiture from videos sent to me by friends around the world plus the little short of me throwing one of my paintings into the sea that had finally convinced me my practice lay somewhere within a moving picture or performance and that 2D art wasn’t enough.

Another book I’ve explored this summer was DaDa Performance edited by Mel Gordon. I’d explored the use of social media to generate sentences and used it within a collage of 12 weeks of shredded printmaking and I want to explore that more within praxis.

I started this by putting together a storyboard on Procreate developing characters that I’d conceptualised using an AI program that I’d investigated within my painting during the summer.

Thinking that I might like to explore some live performance elements, even if they are filmed and incorporated into the moving picture short. I started to ask around for volunteers for my characters. Everyday Pain is a little fat wrestler masked and dressed in red. My husband is an ex-professional wrestler so he was ideal especially as he too wrestles with everyday pain after breaking his back wrestling. Humanity (that’s me) in the blue corner, blue badge, no way can I physically wrestle but Ben from my village is an ex-MMA fighter waiting for a knee op and said he’d love to get involved. I’ve not cast Sister Morphine or Art but I have a few ideas about who I’d like!

Now I have my narrative the next step is to engage social media for sentence feedback and to translate the picture storyboard into actual wrestling moves once I have that I can shoot a pre-vis my son says he might piggyback onto my shoot and incorporate my ‘story’ into an action advert for his showreel if he does that it would be an ideal opportunity to see first hand some of those film conversations in practice and a great learning opportunity for me.