‘Grass, rock, stone and the terror surrounding’

This is the video piece I presented at the Conceputal Project crit yesterday!

After developing various ideas over the past 2 weeks this is the stage I am at now. My initial thoughts were to create a performance or video piece that would convey the title ‘Nation’. I wanted to pair this project up with my interest in time, and felt it would be an appropriate combination since I could relate our nation of Scotland with our history and the people who experienced it.


I played around with photography, video, text and performance. I felt more at ease creating work when I put the thought of producing a ‘final piece’ out of my head. This way I was able to experiment with a handful of ideas and materials without any irrational pressure to come up with a polished end piece.

My close friend Calum is staying with us at the flat every Monday and Tuesday until December for work here in Edinburgh at a publishing firm. Calum writes and performs poetry and is extremely good at it. We have discussed working on more projects together as we did in the summer and I felt his input on this occasion would prove to be a worth while venture.

I already had a dozen or so photographs showing my flatmate CJ in a dimly lit room in motion holding a clock. After adjusting settings on my camera I was able to manipulate the shutter speed and create blurred images. I wanted to do something with 2 specific photographs so I jumped on iMovie and played around with layering the 2 on top of each other. Along with some contrast and saturation adjustments I flipped one of the images upside down and for a minute I liked what saw.

Next, I spoke to Calum about how he would feel contributing to the project. He was up for it! I presented him with the brief we received along with one of my own detailing my intentions for the piece. I showed him the minute long slide I had prepared on the iMac and he began to write.

5 minutes later he read out what he had come up with. (I posted a photograph of the transcript yesterday)

Pleased with the narrative Calum had written I got to work on figuring out how to record his voice and import it onto iMovie. Once that was done I listened to the piece a few times through and adjusted the 1 minute slide so that it panned slowly from the bottom left corner up to the right hand corner. The pace at which Calum spoke was something I had to keep in mind when adjusting the speed of the panning. I wanted the viewer to be able to notice the panning and maybe wonder what exactly it is they are looking at as well.

Overall I think the piece works. I couldn’t have achieved it without Calum so a lot of credit is headed his way! I was pleased that my initial vision of making a work that conveys a torrid and passionate 3 way relationship between Scotland, it’s people and it’s history was able to be fulfilled. I still believe the piece needs development and maybe split apart and looked at again.