My second outcome is installation and I initially planned to fill a room with projections of the afterlife. In the peer review, it was suggested that I tried sculpture or animation to make my installation more engaging.
I thought about how I could project an animation, and how it could interact with something already in the space.
I looked at Albert Oehlen's 'Home and Garden' [27], especially the piece which involved projecting a film onto his painting. Oehlen explained: 'you want to see the movie and you forget about the painting but actually you stare at my painting for an hour and a half and it is burned into your eyes'. In my own work, I could use this idea to encourage people to contemplate mortality and afterlife for longer.
I also looked at Sanya Kantarovsky's 'Happy Soul' [28], which features an animation that interacts with a drawing of a figure. This inspired me to think about how my animation could alter the image it is projected onto.
To experiment with these ideas, I placed tracing paper over my own photos of clouds and a graveyard so I could sketch out potential animation ideas. On the clouds, I thought I could project perceptions of the afterlife. I tried out traditional ideas of the steps and gates to heaven to show the idea of entering the afterlife, as well as an elaborate church and a manor house because they symbolise luxury and paradise. On the cemetery, I tried drawing more graves to make it crowded, showing how inescapable death is. I also drew a dark fog and some faces in the mist to show the eerie feeling of the space. This makes the viewer more engaged with the image because it plays on the feeling of fear associated with death.
I decided to go with the house in the clouds idea and made a storyboard to work out the sequence of the animation. I want the house to look like it is being built, with more and more detail being added. The stairs will extend from cloud to cloud and then down towards the viewer, to connect them with the idyllic house.
I intend to conduct interviews to use for background sound in my installation. I will ask people how the pandemic has made them think about mortality- whether they have been more mindful of concepts like the afterlife or not.
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