Research Note 15: The Same but Different

I've been thinking about loops recently, and then I found these drawings in a notebook.

They are from a storyboard I made before shooting Making Her Mark* in 2017. Looking at them now, alongside photographs from the actual shoot, I can see that the idea is still there.

But the stills from the film are different.

Looking at the drawings again, I realise that each little sequence is almost a loop in itself — the woman lifts the pencil onto her shoulders, moves with it, puts it down, and begins again.

An idea has to begin somewhere — in this instance, after I read Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory. It enters via an image, a dream, or notes I’ve jotted down in a notebook. Then there is a period of waiting while it slowly becomes something.

A kind of gestation.

I can make drawings and plans and imagine how something might look, but when I begin to make it, the work starts to change.

The storyboard isn't discarded. It is still there, underneath the finished work. But something happens in between these two points.

Same, but different.

I think this is part of the process of most artistic endeavours. An idea begins in one form and, through the process of making, finds another. At least that is how it works for me.

I imagine it’s similar to giving birth to a human being, although I can't really know what that experience is like. I imagine it’s seeing a child become its own person. The child is made from the genes of its parents, but it is not them. It carries things from previous generations too — some visible, some hidden — and then somehow becomes itself.

Maybe a work does something similar.

It carries its beginnings with it, but eventually it insists on becoming itself.

I can’t make it stay where it started.

Storyboard for Making Her Mark, 2017 ©️

Stills from Making Her Mark, (10mins/Col/Digital) 2018 ©️

*Making Her Mark was commissioned and funded by The Wapping Project and was included in a solo exhibition of the same name at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, Lochmaddy, North Uist, in 2018. The work is held in the Collection of the Arts Council of Ireland and will be included this winter in Ciall. Mothú den Ghaeltacht – A Gaeltacht Sensibility at An Gailearaí, Gort an Choirce, Co. Donegal, Ireland.