What question do you keep coming back to in your arts practice?
These are the 3 questions that constantly run through my mind while working on a photo story or documentary:
“Why am I working on this?”Why should I work on this?”
“Is this the way this topic should be covered?”
“Why is this person allowing me to work with them (to document them)?”
How does your arts practice allow you to respond creatively to conflict/crisis around you?
I don’t think I’ve directly addressed the environmental conflict in my work till now. But conflict takes the role of a subliminal vessel that contains and carries my work. It isn’t what a project is about, but it’s what the project speaks through.
What do you enjoy most about the process of creating new work and what recurring challenges do you encounter?
In everyday life, I perceive my environment in quite a superficial manner. By creating new work, or revisiting old pieces, I question my intentions and my stimulus. Through researching topics that I’m less familiar with and observing the subsequent work that follows I understand my environment at a deeper level. By the end of a project, I understand myself better, but this clarity in understanding myself is short lived and I feel the need to create again. At the end of the day, this process sounds quite selfish, but these moments of clarity with respect to my environment and myself is what I enjoy most about it. The consistent challenge that I face while creating is to find work that really speaks to me and to figure out how I want to address it. Once I’m over this hurdle, I readily welcome all the other turmoil.
