l'Heritage de Nos Trois Moins

Multimedia Process Artwork. Jan 2012.

installation concept art process art French Charis Edward

The raw material. Poems and photos from my brief relationship with Cuntface.

Words and images are too very different mediums for expression. Personally, I find a very strong link between words and my negative emotions and also images for positive emotions. When in a negative state of mind I wrote, when happy I snapped snaps. Always polarized, never balanced.

When objectively observing my mad woman scrawls after the relationship had ended, I noticed the poignancy of reading past emotions. The poetry of my words was apparent only after. My love of poetry, especially the works of Arthur Rimbaud, developed the idea further. So much is lost when you translate a poem from the original language into your own mother tongue. So I wondered what could be gained from translating my ramblings into french?

After the translation came the process of turning my words into a medium which could be understood despite the obvious language barrier. How do you convey the emotion behind the concept when people may not be able understand what you are saying?

l'Heritage Light was the development of the idea that I could express the words through drawing with light. I played with the idea of using a projector to 'write' the words onto a wall. Experimenting with the idea of comfort from a tangible source, with illuminating my words by making them bright in a dark room. During the process I create macquettes of my ideas.

l'Heritage Drawing is based on my aforementioned idea about words and images being polar methods of conveying emotion. In a situation where there is no balance, I tried to find a balance. When making grey, you mix black and white. Therefore, by using the words I wrote in my darkest of moods, I drew the picture of my most cherished memory of the relationship. The blackest Black and the whitest white. Together they gave a balanced view.

When looking at my words I noticed how my writing came from a place of anxiety and distress. I thought about how these concepts are closely linked to 'madness' and insanity. The idea to write the words on the walls of a plain white room was linked to the visual we often see in the media of a madman scrawling on the walls of his cell. I was driven 'insane' by the relationship. I doubted my own thoughts and feelings. This was a good way to project the idea, wasn't it?