Dog, Fish, Bag. Tape, Narrow, Measure. Death, Birth, Teapot.
A selection of three random words. Take any three words and you can find a connection, and from this make an image. Not an easy task but a fun one for sure.
I choose, Death Birth Teapot from the several triplets of words given as the ideas of birth and death initially spoke to me. There were others that did too, but I wanted to go with my original instinct.
This brief was much longer with a week to complete the task. I began exploring what each of the words meant individually; the meanings, denotations and connotations of each. Within the research I found Lu Tong’s ancient poem that speaks of Seven Bowls of Tea (many translations, I made a compilation using my favourites). The poem deconstructed finds a story of a man through the journey of his life time - from birth, to life, to death, to the afterlife. The poem was a perfect starting place for the project as it tied in just so nicely with my given themes.
I got stuck a few times with where to move on with this project, but research kept me thinking. I compiled a lot of research on birth and death rituals in culture, how they vary. I was very fascinated by the new things I found. Like the birth rituals of the Umtata - SIFUDU is where the newborn child is passed through the pungent smoke of burning sifudu leaves which irritates the child's senses. This procedure, for them, is to without a doubt give the child fearlessness so it can stand its ground later in life.
A death ritual that captured me was the Tibetan sky burial procedure. They take the body to the mountains for a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony where the flesh is given back to the earth through the vultures. They see it as an honor to be part of the earth's life cycle, giving life to the vultures with their own death. They do not hold dear to them the body of a loved one like we do, and instead believe that it is purely the current vessel of the soul, which in death passing on, leaving the body unimportant.
These ideas spurred many images in my mind. I wanted to create something that captured the beauty and sensitivity of the rituals I had researched. I had the idea to create stop frame with a tea set early on. I owned a teapot and knew where I could purchase a nice tea set. This would be how I would tell the story of Lu Tong's Seven Bowls of Tea.
Something that I had previously found in the library was a book on sculpture and film, The Paradoxical Object by Joan Truckenbrod. The book featured installations that optimised sculpture, conceptual art and film by projecting film onto objects. It was a highly interesting read and was something I went back to for inspiration.
My idea was to take my teapot a project some of the films/documentaries I had found in my research, and project them onto my teapot in order to tell a story of birth and death.
I ending up shooting the projector scenes at Uni in the studio and the stop frame at home I brought it all together as a film, hoping that the ideas would work together, even if it was in juxtaposition.
In the end I was very satisfied with how it turned out. The film edited by myself with some soundtrack, which were free source sounds I found online, which I then edited. The ringing sound is actually a Tibetan singing bowl, which kind of tied the whole thing together nicely.
