Artist Statement:
This project was a pretty big challenge for me. As a
visual learner, I am much more used to creating art that is meant to be enjoyed
visually. This project really made me step outside my comfort zone and pay
attention to things that I normally just took for granted. Once I started
paying attention, however, my eyes were opened to the hundreds of processes I
experience every day, without even realizing it.
It started when I watched the Routines series by Daniel Mercadante. In the videos he perfectly
illustrates the beauty in the mundane tasks that we as humans do every day. Most
of the time we don’t even notice that we’re doing them. They’re such a
miniscule part of our day that we breeze through these processes without a
second thought.
While watching the Routines series, it reminded me of a quote my Mom has on our wall
at home. It simply says “Find joy in the
journey”. I looked at that quote
every day for years and years and never quite understood what it meant.
Recently though, as I’ve been learning about and discussing processes in a
couple of my classes, I’ve come to understand it better. In life, and
especially in art, sometimes the end result isn’t what really matters. It’s the
process, the making of the thing that makes art so rewarding. When we focus so
much on outcomes rather than processes, we overlook valuable insights and
experiences that can only come in and through the process, or the journey if
you will.
For our process piece we chose to document the
process of writing a paper. There are a lot of interesting sounds associated
with writing a paper, from a squeaky eraser to typing to printing it off. It
was actually a lot of fun to play with the sounds and figure out what sounds
best communicated the process we were trying to document.
My favorite part of this project was editing the
sounds we had together. One stylistic choice we made was to have the sound of
the printer go on for about 30 seconds, which is a really long time. There were
two main reasons we had it go for so long. The first was that it’s just kind of
funny, (or at least we thought so). The other more artistic reason is that it
adds a level of emotion to the piece. When I listen to the printer going on
forever, it brings up feelings of impatience and frustration, which I feel on a
regular basis when I’m waiting for my assignments to print. For us it is an
accurate representation of life and a way to recognize the feelings we attach
to our little every day processes.
~Brontë Campbell
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