ART TNEET is the first episode of what will become a small season of influential artists form Barnsley; most of the artists involved are now based in Leeds. This episode focuses on my boyfriend Harley and his experience as a painter, the other episodes will focus on his highly artistic friend group from painters, poets, musicians and so on, throughout these episodes we aim to show how being from a small mining community alike ours embeds itself onto our work, and in fact without the everyday mundane of Barnsley there work wouldn’t exist.
Harley speaks openly on our town and particularly the village in which he grew up “Grimethorpe”, his work is inspired by marking in which he finds around the town, he’s fascinated with the way people act in everyday life and the sense of community in which Barnsley has, he goes on to explain that in leaving this small town he’s no longer a part of that community, he’s now an observer, he believes markings left around the town become deeply cultural, he goes on to express once these markings are taking from there original environment they become gestural. Harley wants to take markings and bring them to life, bringing them from a lower status to a huger one “a higher level of appreciation”, our town is full of inspiration, its full of wise minds that have been stuck within this town, I found it extremely interesting to see Harleys artistic interpretation of this and how this inspired his work.
For this particular project I directed, cinematography, audio and editor for me this project was refreshing, we had no time limit or brief to follow we just wanted to create, we decided to film this project within Harleys bedroom based on the big bay windows letting in light, this room also doubles up as his studio allowing us to film his paintings also, I decided to get in contact with a local 16mm filmmaker from Grimethorpe and asked if I could use some archival footage of the village that I felt really worked with what was being said on set, I cut this alongside footage I’d film on super 8 the pervious year in a mining pit in Barnsley, we then decided to drive back to our town and film the home he grew up with alongside his grandparents, his granddad worked down the pits it was inspiring to here his thoughts on this and be able to get footage of him within his workshop.
Harley goes on to express as an artist its important to be able to document through different mediums, may that be film, painting, drawing, writing, poetry or music and not to stick to just one medium, to highlight issues and marking through various different ways. Overall this project was super interesting to me and I feel its something I’d like to develop on over the years, removing my voice was a choice I made in editing, I wanted to take away th middle man and rather than have him answering my questions, have him speaking directly to the audience, another aspect of editing I really liked was the colour grading, I tried making him almost alike a silhouette, were not here to be observed as people, yet as artists, we want you to hear his words and take in the information rather than being focused primarily on Harley.
We received some amazing feedback on this project and we have few people get in contact to say they would like an episode created on them, I feel like this is something we will be developing over the next few years and I’m really optimistic.
ART TNEET: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJc0cDQHSDU&t=467s
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