Er, hello! Happy Friday. It’s been a while. I’ve been slowly trying to work on new things to write about and make videos about, but end up bogged down in a pile of emails and a browser full of tabs of Great Opportunities that I’m submitting proposals to barely before the deadlines. Any tips for getting both these and new work done while I’m not washing dishes at a local pub greatly appreciated. I’d write about my adventures in the pub here, although it’s not that exciting, and I’m sure there was something in the contract about talking to journalists… I wonder if blogging counts?
It’s snowing outside, but not the happy fluffy kind. boo.
Anyway, I’ve written some thoughts and a small story about a video I’m working on, buuuuut I’ve submitted it to a journal, so will hopefully get to share the link for you to read it on there, rather than on here sometime soon. If they don’t want it, you’ll get to see it it here, so we’ve just got to wait and see. I’m quite pleased with it, so fingers crossed.
In the meantime, the brief synopsis is that I’m working on something involving some of the trees that fell during storm Arwen back in November, in a woodland that I spent bits of my childhood adventuring in. If you’ve seen Forest, my first video, you’ll see bits of where I mean. If you’ve not seen Forest, you can see it here. The whole thing is embedded at the bottom of the page. I made the film on my phone, and used the portrait format a phone makes to think about composition of the images.
At the moment, I’m thinking about the angles the trees in this wood have fallen to, and what it might mean to try turn them back the right way up.
I’ve been drawing from the videos I shot in the woods. There’s a kind of nice challenge to drawing something that’s the wrong way around – like that exercise with the upside-down horse – it makes you stop and look at the shapes it’s making, rather than worrying that it doesn’t look like a horse.
Anyway, drawing included in both landscape and portrait so you can decide:
Coming soon: thoughts about toilets, which I’ve been promising since December…
and also, if I can get my head around the details, something about the fight that folk local to this wood are having to ensure safe use of the forest because someone’s built a ridiculously large sniper / rifle range in it and didn’t tell anyone until they heard the bangs. I’m not anti-gun or anti-shooting generally, (something else on the list to write about, please don’t disown me, I’m banking on nuance to save us all from the culture wars), but well-used walking routes intersect the area of the range, and there’s an outdoor centre at one edge of the site. People are rightly worried.
Jessie Growden 