Category: Art

In the middle of the night I woke with the memory of a module about home in my moving image degree (2013). I couldn’t remember what I had produced for the module. I felt an urge to look at the external hard drive that contained all my work from that time. It was the middle of the night! However compelling the urge was, it could wait. I went back to sleep. That was Thursday night.

On Friday evening I plugged my hard drive into the laptop and in the directory was a file called journal-FINAL. The file contained my process notes for a short film I made called ‘Adaptations’ that was very much influenced by the home module. I was exploring ideas about what makes a home (things we use everyday?), how we identify with home, being exiled from home, and the relationship dynamics within home.

My partner and I were about to go on a trip to Tyneham in Dorset, which is a village taken by the British Army in 1944 so they could use the land for war practice. They promised the inhabitants that they could return to their homes after the war but the Ministry of Defence kept the land. They still use it for tanks and shooting practice.

My father was in the army and he killed himself when I was 9. My mum, sister and I had to leave our house, and community, because we were no longer valuable (if we ever were) to the army. We were stationed in Bovington, the nearest army base to Tyneham. There were beautiful woods behind our house and I used to spend a lot of time with the trees. I knew the feeling of being pushed out from a place I loved, like the villagers of Tyneham.

My partner and I watched Adaptations 3 times, at his request. It has no words, just sounds I’d found on a free sounds website to use as foley, and a beautiful, haunting flute composed by a friend at the beginning and end. You can portray a lot without words. The film was a way for me to work through a relationship breakup at the time.

I don’t know why I didn’t share it on my website earlier. I kind of forgot about the film until the intuitive prod to look at the home module occurred. Reading the accompanying journal was interesting. Here’s an excerpt that relates to the film:

A few weeks before he died, my mother and father had an argument in which it seemed he wanted to leave the relationship. They reconciled and he made a big show of making an effort with her, whilst she seemed resigned and closed down. Their communication always seemed to be broken but they managed to keep the relationship going until he died. I wonder how much of their ability to keep going related to how we lived and the objects that we saw everyday that helped us to retain our identities: the kitchen objects, the lounge objects, the bedroom objects. The mundane things that we touched and used or played with daily were real; they had tangible substance, whereas the arguments and the acts of undermining and violence could be ‘forgotten’ with enough distraction.