Going Home
As I noted last Sunday, this past weekend I made my last trip home from Gig Harbor, Washington (where I grew up) back to Oregon. The drive can take anywhere from 3.5 hours to 5 hours depending on traffic, rest stops, and detours. Yesterday, I took the long way home. Along this route around the shores of the Puget Sound, I let my thoughts meander, and I recorded the moment. I share a few of these recordings today as a reminder that the creative process is varied, and complex, and comes in many forms and on unexpected turns. And it’s okay to embrace it all, even when you have no idea where it’s going.
But first - a short explanation of where my compulsion to record voice memos started.
Recording & Video Installation
I have long been enamored by installation art and have had the pleasure of seeing many variations and visions of how artists will immerse a person in an experience. From large-scale formats such as Omega Mart in Las Vegas and the AI-Generated Art of Hito Steyerl’s This is the Future, at the Portland Art Museum, to more intimate experiences such as the Henry Gallery’s 2023 show, Thick as Mud. I especially love the use of video as a medium and realized in 2022 when I was preparing to clear out my childhood home that I had a story I wanted to explore, and video might need to be a part of that journey.
I started by recording my experiences during every one of the eight trips I made to my family home over the last year. I made video recordings, voice memos, and journal notes throughout the process. I am now cataloging what I have and thinking about how and what will be saved and presented as an eventual video art piece. In the meantime, I decided to share the following short notes with you from last Sunday, along with my first tiny steps in playing with video for this eventual piece. Needless to say, I have a long way to go…
Voice Recordings: January 21, 2024
Notes on the Creative Process
[Recording #336] Art is that moment in which you take a creative concept, a wild idea, an inspiration, and turn it into something that has form, that has accessibility, that has a means for other people to understand or see your concept or idea. I’m becoming more and more aware of that as I see how artists function in different types of media and when I look at different art forms as a whole. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how the imagined becomes a physical form and the similarities of this process between various art forms. For instance, I’ve recently been watching Project Runway (season 17) [one of my stitch-and-watch guilty pleasures] engrossed in the story of these designers putting together fashion that brings an idea, or personal concept into a tangible form, and in doing so sends a piece of themselves out into the world. I see this also happening in cooking competition shows such as Top Chef [my cook-and-watch guilty pleasure], in which you’ll hear Tom Colicchio (the primary chef judge) talk a lot about what takes a dish to the next level, making it a cut above an ordinary dish. In both shows, you’ll hear the judges talk about having a point of view with their respective art forms. They’ll talk about not putting everything into one idea but curating it to make it so that your viewpoint is understood. And I find the language they are using to inspire these artists in the fashion and culinary worlds can be valuable for many art forms, and especially meaningful to me in the visual arts world. If I look at my art and think about distilling it to the heart of what I want to convey - it can be very valuable as a part of the creative process and completely change the outcome. I find it interesting how art is really about taking this creative emotion and trying to give it shape and life in a way that other people can see and experience it. To me, it’s a reminder that when we engage in a creative practice we’re more connected than we realize and have so much to learn from each other and each different medium. I am encouraged to keep expanding my creative landscape while continuing to tease out the story of what and why I create to (hopefully) gain a clear artistic point of view.
[Original Audio File]
[Recording #339] I feel like I’m slowly finding my creative voice as I’m taking all these ideas that have been floating around in my head for years and coalescing them into a new body of work. And sometimes, as doubts creep in, I just have to step back and be proud of the fact that something tangible is being made out of this idea that is uniquely mine and unique to my experience, yet offers an entry point to something more universal - and for me, right now, that is all I can hope for, and where I believe the magic is waiting for me. I am drawn to other art forms for these simple reasons as well - just experiencing the magic that someone else created and is sharing and offering with an outstretched hand to bring me into their world. I find it beautiful.
[Original Audio File]
[Recording #330]
To the road ahead,
Jennifer