What an incredible project to work on! In less than three months, visual artist Hannah Smith and I developed a cross-artform concept from scratch, created the piece in its separate parts, and put it together using sound equipment and editing software we’d never worked with before. The resulting short film, In the Gaps, which was screened at the Small is Beautiful festival last week, simmered with visual and dramatic power, and earned loud applause from our audience, some of whom were visibly moved.
As we collaborated on this commission from Solihull Culture/Small is Beautiful, Hannah and I talked about our different creative practice, exploring the resonances in our artistic aims. Her intuitive process, connecting nature and emotional health, leads her to create an abstract acrylic painting which she ultimately (and unexpectedly) separates into smaller pieces. She works through stages – ‘messy’, ‘stuck’, ‘breakthrough’, among others. I was fascinated by her approach, how she channels emotion into the texture of the piece (“It’s the feeling, not the look”), the deliberate fragmentation of the whole, and then the physical gaps that emerge, if briefly.
The obvious role for me was to write something beautifully poetic to accompany her visual artwork. But the truth is I’m a dramatist not a poet. My specialism is writing character and voice, crafting scenes with depth and emotion that transport an audience into my characters’ world, to feel as if they are present within the story. My creative process involves developing characters for the audience to engage with, and stories that will lead them (if I’m successful!) to some new understanding, viewpoint or unexpected meaning. We hoped our very different skills would act as a springboard for each other, and we were about to find out!
So, during her exhibition at the Courtyard Gallery last November, Hannah photographed her latest painting as she created it, capturing the new layers formed by her brush-strokes. By the end, she had collected 131 shots for our short film. Inspired by this, I set about writing an audio monologue which complemented and resonated with the artwork as it grew to completion. As I pondered the animated version we now had, I wondered about adding a deconstructing aspect – i.e. from the complete painting, we would immediately reverse the frames till we reach a blank canvas once again. To me, this felt like the arc of dementia – a life builds up to its beautiful peak then gradually and painfully deconstructs – and this became the basis of my monologue.
Once the script was finished, we recorded actor Claire Jones performing it magnificently – and we now had visuals and an audio track for our film. Editing it was daunting and frustrating but we managed, learning a host of new skills in the process.
The end result, we hope, expresses the joint strength of our experience as female artists. You can watch it HERE. The project required a bold approach as it was new territory for us both – for my part, I loved embracing the kind of fearlessness and let’s-give-it-a-go attitude that you need when blundering into the unknown. As artists, I think we were good for each other – allowing our creativity to take over, and frequently reassuring each other not to worry about where we would end up.
That’s the great thing about Small is Beautiful – the commissioners ask for work-in-progress, they want you to take artistic risks and be ready and willing to fail. So when the festival opened last week, with 25+ different commissions, it offered its audience the most eclectic range of theatre/dance/music/cross-genre performances and screenings I’ve seen in the West Midlands to date, with an equally impressive range of artwork exhibited in the Courtyard Gallery. Roll on next year!
HANNAH SMITH is an artist who specialises in intuitive abstract paintings which are nature inspired and created in a mindful way to improve well-being. More about Hannah HERE.
Liz John 