The initial plan for my residency was to go through video footage, images and writing pieces that I accumulated since the last time I made a film.

Finding these images I’m sharing today immediately changed the tone of what I needed to say.

I don’t feel like I can do the “welcome to my blog” thing for this; it’s too abstract, too sad, too intimate. So I recorded audio instead of writing the image description, and there is a transcript for it below too.

Transcript:

Hi. So I want to talk about these images that I’m posting. I selected them in… I selected them on Tuesday and then was at a loss, I didn’t know what to write, what image description to write… that is not boring. What kind of context to give to it, or what introduction to give to it.  Because these photos are the photos I took in November 2019 in Ventspils, Latvia, where my grandparents live, and that was the last time that I visited them – I was a complete emotional mess. And none of the words seemed right, so I’m recording this audio now.  So those of you who are just here for matter of fact description, let me do it first. There are three photographs. They are in landscape orientation mode and, and these images show sand. Just sand, what else can I say, but very particular sand, obviously, it’s the Baltic Sea beach. The sand is very light in colour, almost off-white. You… The image shows this interesting pattern on the surface, it shows thin kind of lines created by the wind: very long, thin, wobbly lines quite close to each other. And then it shows footsteps in the sand like sole imprints, that are more rough. Like while the pattern created by the wind is very gentle, as if you know the sand was stroked in this gentle way. The imprints, the sole imprints are obviously like more rough and deeper. There are also like little pebbles of different colours kind of scattered around the images. They’re mostly medium shot. One of them is kind of like a long, longer shot. One is more of a close up, and it maybe makes me think a teeny tiny bit of the surface of the moon. You know that patchy quality of it. But yeah, when I saw this image, the thing that came to my mind was, Oh my God, this is kind of my DNA like the DNA of my perception of the world, the DNA of my perception of beauty, my understanding of what home feels like. It is a very quintessential element of growing up by the sea in that particular place. And also, it’s quite stunning in maybe a quiet, more reserved way. But that’s me talking about the place itself, not necessarily about what these photographs would convey to other people. 

Being sick with COVID kinda ended up being the perfect time to explore the thing I’m doing for Videotage – having a go at creating an intervention for their Leave Your Body realm in Minecraft.

I’ve been struggling with falling asleep for more than a year, and whenever I get sick I secretly hope that falling asleep will become easy at least for a while – it never does. So feeling poorly, unable to sleep and very bored, I tried my first build.

I never played Minecraft before, it took me a couple of tries and a couple of random YouTube tutorials to get the hang of the most basic things.

The game was fun and quite calming, it required the perfect level of engagement and effort for somebody lying sick in bed. I loved doing a bit of math to figure out the scale of what I wanted to do, and then thoroughly enjoyed the repetition of placing a block after block next to each other. it drew me in. Tiny repetitive tasks can be a source of calm to neurodivergent bodies.

I don’t know if Videotage had things like disability and dissociation in mind when they named the project Leave Your Body, but being disabled, we get a lot of reasons to want to leave our bodies so it all really connects for me.

I decided to recreate my bedside table but massive like a tall building. The bedside table was nearby, quite pleasant in shape, basically contained my life in it, and maybe by now, it is an established subject matter in Disability Arts iconography?

As with the current semi-lock down in Hong Kong, just as in most other lock downs, people develop an inexplicable bubbling primal urge for greenery and sunlight. So this last weekend my partner and I took our poodle to do a short hike on Hong Kong’s outlying Lamma Island.

Although I had seen it before, I somehow completely forgot about this sizeable man-made hole in the hillside along the hiking route, that dated back to the Japanese occupation (1941 – 1945). It is said that this cave was used to hide boats ladened with explosives that would have been launched into unsuspecting enemy ships. There is a small stainless steel plaque near the cave describing it as a “kamikaze grotto” along with some information. However, I have found some speculation on if the caves were ever in use or if the boats and their operators were intended to be sacrificial.

In thinking about the city’s relationship with the subterranean this instance is unique in that it supports a larger historical narrative and also takes on the significance of a landmark. What is essentially an empty hole, contains within it so much thick tension through the power of absence. Somehow it manages to be a very “heavy hole”

To assist in thinking about this I found this quote from Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane:

“We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”

Hello, I am Jess Starns and here is a bit about my studio. My creative process is participatory, collaborative, and inclusive with a focus on social history (mostly Brighton’s history), disability and neurodiversity. It is also multidisciplinary, with materials and approach informed by the theme of the project. I am always interested in learning about new tools to create art that I find accessible and can use to collaborate with others. I like creating art with others that doesn’t feel like you are creating art.

I studied the Inclusive Arts Practice MA at the University of Brighton and this has had a big impact on my practice. Some of my biggest influencers are the Hove cinematographers, Sister Corita Kent and Lee Miller. I enjoy darkroom printing and even though it’s not a huge part of my practice currently, I have been doing so since I was about four years old.

During the residency I am looking forward to developing my creative practice and finding new ways of working whilst exploring the residency theme ‘environmentalism’.  Please free to look around my studio, and send me a message in the comments section below. Enjoy
looking around! Jess.

Hi

Today is the first day of my residency with Vital Capacities and Both Sides Now. So I thought I’d post some pictures of soil – for things to grow. I said it before but when the virtual studio’s layout doesn’t remind me of Tumblr themes, it reminds me of a garden patch.

Devil’s dykes’ past performer Rosa Farber explained to me that the soil on their family’s vegetable farm is a very very special kind. It is rich in all those minerals that I can’t recall but that sounded important, making that soil a sort of miracle. I know very little but I could sense its power. I am holding the image of the soil’s rich heavy potency in my mind.

Below are two photos of the actual soil, and my first proper attempt at recording an audio description. Digging your fingers in the soil you can find nearby is a valid and great alternative to my rambling.