Galang nguruindhau
(Ga-lung ngoo-rroo-win-dha-woo)
The Turrbal and Yuggera peoples have lived in this area for more than 32,000 years and their ancestors go back more than 60,000 years. The Turrbal and Jagera people speak Yuggera and their name for Brisbane is Meanjin. I am grateful for the culture I am able to share with you about their beautiful stories and connection to land through this artwork today...
I Acknowledge the value, diversity and integrity of Aboriginal art, culture and expression as an integral part of Australian heritage. I hold sincere respects for my abilities to be able to learn and reclaim this rich culture, past, present and future. I would also like to acknowledge the Turrbal and Yugara people as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I work, live and learn, and where the location of my artwork is based. I recognise their continued connection with the land, water and community. Today we pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.
Please Visit https://www.turrbal.com.au/ for more about the land we live here in Brisbane
Personal Brief for this Series of Kinetic Image and Text:
Within the specifications of this project, I will produce one art based video project and one commercial style artist advertisement using Adobe After Effects and Adobe Rush.
personal Artist statement
Mangroves frame the landscapes of Nudgee Beach area, their roots are the veins within the land we walk as the tides breath life into them. This work explores relationships with land and country, the connections we, first nations people hold to the land and the role the country as a living organism plays in our lives. I invite the viewer to capture the emotions of the landscape through the immersive nature of my work. The water rises and falls on the shore as if it breathes life into itself with each tidal movement as captured in this sculptural video installation. The Turrbal vocabulary you are reading in this piece explain the environment around you with the analogy of the human body, each piece of nature on this beach lives and breathes life into this country.
Inspirational Artists
Lara Madeline Rand - Tidal Movement - Creative Generation at GOMA 2020
This artwork sparked my main inspiration to create a sculptural piece at Nudgee Beach, I remember seeing this in a gallery and being stunned at the way this captured the surrounding environments in such a thoughtful way. Lara uses her canvas piece to speak of the tidal movements and has taken a more abstract approach to this with paint on canvas.
Joey Holder - Abyssal Seeker (Demersal Zone), 2021 - Sydney Bienale 2022
Marine lifeforms of all shapes and sizes twist and turn in Joey Holder’s immersive video work Abyssal Seeker (2021), which presents us with a scene from the depths of the ocean. Humans cannot travel to these depths without the use of a drone. Deep sea environments like these represent the limits of human knowledge, and our endeavour to know everything about the world we live in. What I really love about Joeys approach to this immersive video is the site where the viewer is invited to view the work. They are surrounded by her video and forced to participate in the artwork itself by standing within the projection.
Site Observations
Nudgee Beach Reserve Site Visits
The initial stage of research for this art based video project was to visit the proposed site for the art piece and take observational photos and videos of the land. This helped me ground myself and connect to the land which I will be installing my art. Whilst at Nudgee Beach, I began sketching ideas, forms and ways to execute this sculpture.
The Nudgee Beach landscapes have inspired the shapes for my sculpture which the video piece will be presented. The way the water creates ripples in the sand will be replicated in the form of the sculpture.
Site Specific Installation - What does this mean?
The context of my video based art project is that it mainly only works as a site specific artwork. The video although can be viewed on its own, will best be viewed at the proposed site of Nudgee Beach. Having this artwork viewed on site really adds emotion and meaning, fully allowing the viewer to connect and immerse in the meaning of the piece. My hopes for this body of work is to be able to expand to multiple on site installations with video art.
Video Planning and Storyboarding - Sketches and Ideation
After Effects Video production process
The text that will overlay my videos for this artwork will be really expressive and personal. Although text is not going to be the main focal point of the artwork, it adds meaning to the imagery you see as the video elapses and allows a more personal connection between the viewer in the immersive environment of this site specific projected video piece. I chose to use words and phrases in Turrbal language that capture the meanings within my work and describe the way the land and sea connect. In this example to the left you can see my animation process for each word, I have used a handwriting font and masked out each letter to be animated in a handwritten style as if the words are being written on the page.
After editing each word separately with the stroke effect customised on each word to get the best natural handwriting effect I could, I exported this file with all of the timings ready as transparent for each word to be overlayed onto my Adobe Rush video.
The quality of these animations is not perfect, but I won't need it to be for my project because of the colours of the background will distract from any small errors in the stroke animations.
Adobe Rush - 4K Video Editing Process
After retrieving all of the footage that I needed from Nudgee Beach Reserve, I took this all into Adobe Rush on my IPad to edit the sequence of videos all together in 4K to keep the quality before exporting to add the text layer which was animated with Adobe After Effects previously. When editing both clips I made sure to keep in mind the timing of the fade in and out of all the text elements that would not interfere with the video too much.
As you can see in the short clip above, I took lots of footage from my visits to Nudgee Beach and layered some on top of others, playing with opacity and speed with transitions fading between each. None of the videos were colour edited at all as I wanted to keep the natural beauty of this artwork.
Mangroves Breathing Final Video Ready for Public View
This is the exact video that will be played on site through my projector when this artwork is ready to be viewed. I will invite the public to attend and stand in silence as they listen to the world around them and take in the landscape that this video will produce. When I am at Nudgee Beach ready for my final piece to be shown, I will trial a few various surfaces other than my sculpture to play the video from to experiment where the video looks best.
After planning and production of the video was ready to be played on site for a public viewing of my art piece, I traveled to Nudgee Beach Reserve and began playing with where I could place my 'screen' to play the video.
I ran into some small hiccups along the way as the projector that I had purchased didn't work as well in the lighting that I had imagined, because of this I had to move the sculpture to a darker place and wait for the sun to go down more.
As you can see in this image, the projection did not work well in every area that I tried. I ended up finding some driftwood and placing it behind my sculpture to hold it up on the beach and played the video just as the sun was setting so that the video could still be seen with the brightness of the projector being so low.
Acompianing designs for social art viewing
(part of marketing as an artist approach)
After designing my video and preparing all of the components of my artwork, I was really compelled to make this experience of testing out my first showing of this piece memorable and invite some people to the beach to see it. This body of work is definately best experienced in a community setting where everyone is standing in silence having a moment of peace with the land they are standing on and a really nice appreciation of the art can be formed this way.
This is a design which I made to hand out to my friends, family and even members of the public who were drawn to come and watch my art video on the beach the day of the viewing. I made this in adobe illustrator as an easier way for people to view my website for Mangroves Breathing and understand the context to the artwork, as you would in a gallery setting by reading the description on the wall. It is also important to me that people will have access to visit my website for this artwork after they have left the site, this will allow them to share my words and art with others and revisit as they desire.
It was also really important for me to have an acknowledgement of country accompanying my artwork and this was the perfect way to do so.
Final Artwork - Video of Public art display
Final video of public art display, a site specific installation that tells the story of connection to land and culture. Mangroves Breathing is a proposal for Nudgee Beach Reserve.
Please view full video (not on projection) higher up on this website.
In future iterations of this work, I would love to connect with some Turrbal elders and record them speaking about the Nudgee Beach landscape in their language. This would make for an interesting layer to the work and add context to the words writing across the screen.
The actual act of viewing this video work in person is a very important process of art making for me. Because of the nature of this piece and the connections to my indigenous heritage, the act of gathering, sharing and having a yarn with some friends and family about my art process and the meaning and process behind my videos is very important to me. People gathered on the beach and observed my work one day which turned the nature of my artwork in a positive direction. Rather than being a theoretical proposal for an art piece, I actually was able to witness the impact my work has on the people that viewed it.
As we gathered on this cold afternoon at Nudgee Beach Reserve, I was able to reflect and appreciate the process of my art making in the moment.
Part two - Promo video (Short)
ARTIST AIM FOR THIS PROJECT
As I am a young emerging designer and artist in Australia, I am really intrigued lately into research surrounding how to market yourself as an artist and create really exciting and engaging content not only through my personal work but within university projects also. As I reach the end of my degree, I am focusing on building up my portfolio with bodys of work which I am really proud of and am constantly looking for ways to showcase this. My second part of this project will be a short looping advertisement video that can be shown on social media and also physical billboards and advertising avenues. This will really help me further my current research of marketing yourself as a working artist online and in person.
Words of the Turrbal Language relevant to this project and used throughout
alive ... milbulpu
(water shrub) ... duntibbin
stump ... billayīr
duggatin ... men, people.
ƞullin ... you and I.
soul ... ƞūrū, nūrul, tuƞgin
sun ... bīgi (bulūbār), (kuiyar)
moon ... killen, bābūn, kākurri (ƞaitjuƞ-gil) (ƞudduƞ)
stars ... mirregin, (mirriƞgim)
earth ... tār or dār
sky ... birra
throat ... (dūnūƞ)
neck ... (ƞurrun)
breast ... tundera (ƞuƞgūr)
back ... toggul
blood ... kaoǔn, giwūr
bone ... tirben or tjīrben, geralgeral, dīƞ
vein ... kaiyuƞ
breath or spirit ... gār, ƞuru
flesh ... paigulpaigul
flesh and blood ... būdelum
fish ... ƞandakul, kuīyur (ƞundaya)
boat ... kūndu
boat's deck ... kurragutta
boomerang ... barrakadan
bushes ... kuddal
grass (another variety) ... tūkkā
light ... kittibilla
night ... ƞūnnū
river ... warril
sand ... yaruƞ
sea ... pāmirrikirri, tabbilbōn
smoke ... dūŭn
spear ... bilan, gunnai
stone ... nulluƞgirra
things ... nunantjin
thunder ... mūmbāl, mūgara
water ... ƞaraoïn, tabbil