I Still Love You (2015)

Background/Development

This piece was a step away from the relationship between analogue and digital. I noticed that my work, at the time, looked at change and how the transition from analogue to digital technology could represent the change in my personal relationships over a period of time. This piece features an audio recording of me reading a line from a letter I received as a child, from someone that meant a lot to me at the time. I wanted to represent the deterioration of meaningful relationships in this video. The line 'Whatever anyone says to you, even if I don't see you much, I still love you' stands out to me because it is a complete contrast to the last thing this person ever said to me. I wanted this to be vague so that it could relate to any personal relationship and for the audience to find their own connection with it. The visual features two overlaid transparent moving images. One moving image shows me posting a letter and the other is a point of view shot of me looking down at my legs walking in the grass. The second visual, with the transparency, gives the impression of rain and uses pathetic fallacy to emphasise the sadness of the audio. I deliberately wore red and edited the colour of the images to black and white with a red filter, to highlight myself and the postbox to create a focal point. The video looks as though I am posting a letter but the idea was that the audience will never know whether the letter was actually posted, whether I changed my mind, whether the recipient received it or who the letter was written to. I feel like the final moving image appeared dream-like, as though a memory, with the colour filter and transparent image overlay. This is another example of how I use the past in my work. It suggests that this could've been at a point when letters were sent and received, before the relationship deteriorated. I feel like this video piece was a starting point for using my raw emotions in my work, in a way that an audience can relate and understand. 

‘I still love you’, Moving Image, 2015

The moving image, ‘I still love you’, features the quote ‘Whatever anyone says to you, even if I don’t see you much, I still love you’ which was taken from a letter I received as a child. I felt like this reflected my close relationship with that person and the distance, which inevitably came between us. It is a sentence that an audience can relate to and reflect on, with any of their own personal relationships. The film features myself posting a letter, as my internal monologue continuously repeats the quote. I wanted the film to appear as though the letter was posted but in a way that enables the audience to question whether or not it was delivered. This was filmed in such a way as to show the uncertainty of whether one will ever hear back from the other half of the broken-down relationship. In this work, I aim to represent the break-down of meaningful, personal relationships over a period of time.