I was totally blown away that my film was awarded Official Selection' at the 'Blow Up Chicago International Arthouse Film Festival' in November 2016. http://www.blowupfilmfest.com/#!/2016/official-selection-and-nominations.html
Plus I got these lovely laurels
My animated documentary short film 'The Camp' was awarded official selection at the 2017 Ethnografilm Festival in Paris (11-15th April) and I spent my birthday in Montmartre where my film was screened at the beautiful Cine 13 cinema. In the break I also managed to squeeze in a visit to the very beautiful Montmartre Museum & Gardens where the film history of Montmartre is documented.
I had a short essay included in Issue 31 of the very aesthetically-pleasing Canadian Magazine 'Uppercase'. The section of the issue was to do with how much of your self-identity is tied in with what you do or make.
My Suitcase of Memories installation can be seen at Hove Museum & Art Gallery until the 7th May 2017 as part of Fabula Collective 'Many Ways to tell a Story' Exhibition, endorsed by Children's Laureate Chris Riddell.
Modern Times - A Graphic Commentary Issue 1, RCA, January 2015
I was born into a family of farmers, and in my early years lived on the family farm with my brother and 4 cousins. It was idyllic. When I was 7 me and my brother had to leave the farm and so began a very difficult year which had a profound effect on both of us. The lights went out for a while.
Towards the end of that year we were taken to a holiday camp, set above a small cove in Devon. The feeling I had on my first visit to the camp I can recall with ease. It was a magical place. I remember looking out of the chalet window at night time and seeing the lights twinkling across the bay. It felt like a light had come on in the darkness. I announced that I wanted to live there. Unbeknown to me my nan had said the same thing and had also fallen in love, my granddad sold the family farm and bought the camp. My Dad and step-mum moved to Devon to run the site with my grandparents. This was to be a new beginning for all of us. (Figure 1)
My nan adored the camp and we all adored my nan. She was full of love for all of us and loved having her large family around her. The camp became that place we would all be together again with my aunties, uncles and cousins and here within the lovely stone wall
confines of the camp began 30 years of family times, some sad but most wonderfully happy. Chalet 15 was my nan and grandad's chalet, it was like another home for me. I spent every school holiday there and it was far removed from my life and school in Derby- shire. It felt like a secret place that no one in my daily life knew about.
The Camp has it’s own history too. Built before the war in the mid/late 1930’s by a group of local business- men, in 1940 the camp was taken over by the army and used as an army base following the fall of France. A regular holidaymaker at the camp had been there as a little girl the day the second world war broke out. She remembered her parents packing everything up and hurrying home. There was still evidence of the war left behind and I always remember being fascinated by the doors in the toilet block which had been saved from the original chalets and had the titles of the of officers on them, painted over but with the outline of the letters clearly visible.
Over the 30 years that followed endless memories were created within these walls. My parents ran the camp, continuing long after my grandparents had retired and we saw people come and go, we saw people return year after year. We also saw families split and families grow, and also saw some sad times but there was de definitely something about the place that drew people back year after year.
When I began my research at the beginning of this project I really wasn’t sure that anyone would feel the same way as me about the camp or that it would mean as much; but it absolutely did. I made a particular connection with a man called Jim. The thing that has struck a chord between him and me is that his memories of the camp, are exactly the same as mine - we did the same things, we rolled on the same grass, we jumped off the same jetty in the cove and swam to the same raft, we drank lemonade and played table tennis in the same club house. The only difference was we did these things 30 years apart. He visited throughout the 50’s and early 60’s and I arrived there in the 80’s. He also adored his nan. Jim gave me a photograph of his nan and granddad in front of their chalet (figure 2). I love this picture because you can get a proper sense of scale of these chalets - you can see how small they were. Jim said of this image ‘The chalet really was no bigger than a beach hut, with just two single beds and a calor gas cooker. Nan loved the chalet, and was eager to unpack and make herself at home. I don’t remember her actually ‘doing’ very much. She was just happy to ‘be’. It was always friendly and easy going, and very much a ‘home from home’ for that week each year. Us kids made friends easily, and many families used to plan to have the same week the following year to meet up again.’ The other thing that gets me about this photo is that I can tell from the tree in the background that this chalet is in exactly the same position in which our family chalet was built 30 years later - Chalet 15. Also visible in the background is the same lovely stone wall that still surrounds the camp today. I felt safe inside those walls. And I wasn’t the only one.
This place, which simply began as a field where the gas board grazed their horses, which then had some huts built on it and some toilets and a building in which people could meet and socialise - there was some- thing so important about this relatively small collection of buildings that made people want to recreate their holidays over and over again, they wanted the same chalet every year, they wanted to know exactly what their home from home would be, they were comforted by having those familiar surroundings and knowing the sorts of memories they would take home with them.
I was drawn to undertake this project so that I could deal with the heavy pile of suitcases of memories I have in my own mind, and the aching desire to record and preserve a feeling of being at a certain place at a certain time, but now I am beginning to deal with other peoples luggage too and to see that the simplest of buildings can hold such a huge significance to people and be part of an important set of memories is wonderful.
Originally published in Modern Times - A Graphic Commentary Issue 1, RCA, January 2015
My Nan cooking for us all in the living quarters
My contribution is mentioned in the following article about the Modern Times publication
brokenfrontier.com/small-press-spotlight-on-modern-times/
30th September – 2nd October, 2016
Genesis Cinema, London
93-95 Mile End Rd
Whitechapel
London, E1 4UJ
The Factual Animation Film Fuss is an animated documentary film festival taking place in east London from 30th September - 2nd October 2016. As well as shorts and features, we aim to showcase all kinds of unconventional documentary projects, including comics, videogames and websites.
In January I was asked by Margaret Huber and Graham Rawle to return to the University of MA to give a talk to the current cohort of the MA in Sequential Design/Illustration. It was a pleasure. I talked through how my project had progressed over the 2 years and also I tried to impart some gained wisdom of what I had learnt along the way. It was great to be back and lovely to be able to talk about the camp again. I can't believe how far I have come from my first year presentation where I was on the brink of tears. I still get nervous but enjoy talking about my work and trying to help others through my own experiences.
I finished on the point because for me it was the most important. For me the MA was much much more than my project. It was much more than making a book or making a film, much more than telling my story, it was also about learning about myself, a time of transformation.
I read this quote from Peter Korn' book 'Why We Make Things and Why it Matters' which had helped me make sense of how I was feeling on the MA - "The simple truth is that people who engage in creative practice go into the studio first and foremost because they expect to emerge from the other end of the creative gauntlet as different people ... There are many motivations, often overlapping and not necessarily rational or conscious or even admirable. But whatever our motivations may be, the bottom line is always the same: we engage in the creative process to become more of whom we’d like to be and, just as important, to discover more of whom we might become. We may make things because we enjoy the process, but our underlying intent, inevitably, is self-transformation."
This MA gave me confidence and the space to develop my ideas, along with discovering capabilities I never knew I had, and enabling me to become the person I wanted to be. for a while it was like seeing myself as someone else, and then I began to feel like that person. And that’s when it all came together.
