From the Same World: Re-making Self, With a Camera

This project investigates personal lived experience and the construction of identity through exploring photo-filmic methods both analogue and digital. Being with particular photo-filmic processes and the natural phenomena that appear in front of the camera can ignite affective experiences through embodied knowing. Using a camera can both prompt and enable a disconnection from the noise of the world by providing a focus on the experience of the present. I am interested in the connection between the object, the camera, the film, the artist and the viewer, and the notions of temporality and chance that exist within these relationships. My approach to my practice is viewed through a lens that considers Laura U. Marks’ haptic visuality, Geoffrey Batchen’s tactility and the image and Pema Chödrön’s teachings on meditation. My project questions how photo-filmic processes, with their reliance on real-world material objects, can be used to explore the non-materiality of meditative engagement, memory, embodied experience and personal subjectivity. My exploration of these processes and practices have also helped me to articulate the very bodily experiences and their benefit that manifest through transformation and change within my art practice and my life. This exploration feels both important and deeply engaging because it is providing for me a means to be in the world and contribute to that world