As a child I would ring the bells at my local church with my best friend multiple days a week and although bellringing is technically secular (it's a form of music like how a violin or piano is), it’s hard to deny the religious veins that run through it, perhaps by its location in the church tower. These ideas really started to interest me after I lived in my Grandfather’s house as a teen and would go to church with him and experience the community practices involved with belief such as live bible readings, reenactments, singing, and Sunday school activities like drawing and the many cups of tea afterwards.

Artworks and stories in western society have long been a tool of Christianity for political change for example the Baroque movement was used as a tool by the Pope to engage the masses in Catholicism through its drama and intensity. A visual language of symbols is a quick way of engaging an audience that can be reused over and over again, therefore, making it a good long-term investment in ways that can’t be expressed in monetary terms.

I want to read into water and people’s connections to it and into natural disasters and the existential horror of them. How people reconcile with their fear of potential uncontrollable natural forces bigger than themselves and how these feelings are used as a tool for interpersonal connection and self-reflection. My dad's upbringing on an island and proximity to the sea greatly influence my interest in the sea as a specific source of spiritual energy and horror/reverence for our tiny stature in the world/universe. An interesting starting point for this idea of world-ending natural disaster is in mythical texts and oral traditions such as the ones in the crosscultural ‘flood myths’ like the flood story told in Abrahamic religious doctrine of Noah’s Arc and in others such as in the myths of the ancient Maya and later Aztecs (Mexica people).

In addition, my mental health history has made me deeply aware of my place in reality and the fear of smallness and inherent ephemerality that comes with being a human that will eventually have everything end and eventually become forgotten. Therefore I want to investigate the emotional connections we can make under the threat of an unknown apocalypse as I believe I can bring an honest depiction to the conversation surrounding this quite wide topic.

In terms of materiality, I’m interested in the process of layering and translucency to create a sense of being lit from within as it helps to visualise a lot of my interests in the spiritual- mostly I've used paint for this but would like to look into other mediums in conjunction. I also like using a naturalistic looseness to give any drawings a sense of energy and the work being driven by human intuition/emotion. Given the area of interest, however, writing and performance may also be a good avenue for exploration given that myth is told through oral tradition.

I’m also looking at the work of Tai Shani who has her own unique visual language that has an emphasis on the hallucinatory and feels very Hellenistic and cultish 

I’m very intrigued by her process of making which always stems from a piece of writing at the core- regardless of whether the writing is included in the resolution of the work. She creates worlds that feel unfamiliar yet familiar, slightly detached from reality that speak to the universality of sensory and tactile experiences. This comes across especially in her performance work for example in her 30min film ‘The Vampyre’. The piece circulates around a single close-up of the vampyre’s face as she monologues to the viewer. With an emphasis on her eyes and blood stained mouth, she holds our gaze and challenges it with subtle eyebrow raises and the baring of teeth in a manner that feels darkly erotic. She is someone who’s work I think will be one of the most helpful due to some of her works overlapping with my current questions

In a more unhinged turn of events I’m also extremely influenced by the surreal comedies of Monty Python and their bizarre plots and logic that flow like a barely lucid stream of consciousness. There’s a lot that can be gained by a more irreverent point of view and one that tries to charm the viewer rather than one more detached and cerebral. Their relevance comes in the form of their disregard for conforming to narrative and worldbuilding structure and pushing boundaries with their depictions of sensitive and serious subjects (namely Christianity in films such as ‘The Holy Grail’, ‘Life of Brian’, and ‘The Meaning of Life’). Their flippant approach to death and disaster is a different perspective that I think will be very useful in maintaining the balance of levity and melancholy in my own work because storytelling especially in a close setting (disregarding subject matter) is mostly an enjoyable activity that we partake in. 

To gain insight looking into religions like paganism that have a larger focus on the mystical may be useful or looking into religions with large pantheons of specialised gods and followers may be helpful due to the highly individual circumstances that cause prayers to each. Mythologies like those could include the greek (or even earlier minoan) due to their wide popularity and connection to water and the sea in their stories. It also feels like a natural graduation from a focus exclusively on Christianity due to it being the blueprint for the Romans and their complex relationship with Christianity. 

Another set of Pantheons that interest me a lot is the Aztec and Mayan mythology due to their unique perspective on life and death. Specifically their story about their journey to the world of the dead I found so comlex and fleshed out. In particular the idea that the afterworld is a temporary state and that there is no eternal paradise is completely different from many of the the religions I’m familiar with and gives my questions a completely different feeling. 

In my ‘WIP show’ piece ‘Gateway’ the paint application was very varied in terms of viscosity and opacity and types of mark-making which breathed a bit of excitement and chaos excitement into the piece. Therefore in my FMP I believe painting is a very good avenue I could go down considering my ‘WIP show’ piece’s chaos splatters and drips that have the potential to aline with my current area of interest. Previously I’ve also explored the idea of the Christian apocalypse but instead approached it as an immortal act of God rather than thinking about it through the lens of a human act of storytelling. I want to also include poetry as part of my FMP as my text work has been the aspect of my practice I’ve developed a lot since starting the course and it would conceptually be appropriate to involve in a project on myth and story. The course has also made me more interested in installation and appreciate the audience interaction in the art and I feel audience participation could also be a good avenue to explore.