Whittling Form Study
Making sense of abstraction is key to any futures oriented practice. Every project is an attempt to figure out and make sense of what isn’t immediately apparent and create avenues for myself and others to access them.
While my practice often revolves around social, political, environmental, or technological issues, I find it extremely helpful to take my sense making practice outside of such loaded issues from time to time. Not only does it allow room for fun (the stakes feel high when you’re looking into things like climate change), but it also reveals new tools and ways of working.
For this project I was tasked with creating something based on a whittle. I learned that I loved whittling, but not for the end result. For me, the process was meditative. I would wake up in the morning, make coffee, go into my studio, turn on some music and whittle for ten minutes. By the end of the ten minutes my head was clear and happy, cleansed by the repetitive motion and feeling of the blade carving through the bass wood.
To fulfill the brief I decided to research this feeling. I began filming myself everyday to see if the physical action might reveal anything about my headspace. Or if I could recreate my headspace through video.
The result uses a variety of tools from After Effects, and includes videos from each day of whittling layered on top of one another.