6.10.20 Michelle Williams Gamaker
Filmmaker, nominated for Jarmon Award, showed work in New Contemporaries. It’s been 20 years since she graduated, and she’s now 40.
Collaboration important to her practice.
How to demystify becoming an artist? Don’t be over-awed by the art world.
She made a film inspired by the film Black Narcissus, which she watched when she was young. It was familiar but all shot at Shepperton. It made her work with fantasy or constructed reality. How are POC marginalised? Her mother is Sri Lankan.
Interested in the process of a film being made and in working with the white majority…. And the paraphernalia of film sets. She leaves little visual clues to make film collages. She collects props, scripts etc which she shows alongside her work in exhibitions. She has made a ‘troubled’ alphabet with the voice of the speaker not the coloniser. She calls it ‘Docu fiction’.
‘Dissolution Trilogy’ is a film within a film…. Main character tells the other characters that they’re in a film set in post colonial 2017.
Interested in gender fluidity… She uses tattoos to give clue too. Sometimes the film is shown as part of an installation, with objects and live performance. She started as a live performer; now she’s interested in the ways performance happens.
How he ue prop in her film:
‘Demi’ is a 1980s mannequin. Nod to Orson Welles’ Time machine, with a mannequin. She uses 2D collaged image alongside the mannequin and a film. She calls it a ‘collaged aesthetic’…
Used an old cinema as a ‘landscape’ for one film.
How is the work shown? Often in galleries, but she makes 2 edits…. One for the gallery (4 channel) and one for eg film festivals (single channel). Think cleverly about how you can have multiple ways your work can be shown.
As an expanded practitioner, she incorporates her teaching and learning expertise into her work, although she tries not to be didactic. She does now find herself being rather obsessive!
(Think about a video lecture as a form of collage…)
Collaboration important to her practice.
How to demystify becoming an artist? Don’t be over-awed by the art world.
She made a film inspired by the film Black Narcissus, which she watched when she was young. It was familiar but all shot at Shepperton. It made her work with fantasy or constructed reality. How are POC marginalised? Her mother is Sri Lankan.
Interested in the process of a film being made and in working with the white majority…. And the paraphernalia of film sets. She leaves little visual clues to make film collages. She collects props, scripts etc which she shows alongside her work in exhibitions. She has made a ‘troubled’ alphabet with the voice of the speaker not the coloniser. She calls it ‘Docu fiction’.
‘Dissolution Trilogy’ is a film within a film…. Main character tells the other characters that they’re in a film set in post colonial 2017.
Interested in gender fluidity… She uses tattoos to give clue too. Sometimes the film is shown as part of an installation, with objects and live performance. She started as a live performer; now she’s interested in the ways performance happens.
How he ue prop in her film:
‘Demi’ is a 1980s mannequin. Nod to Orson Welles’ Time machine, with a mannequin. She uses 2D collaged image alongside the mannequin and a film. She calls it a ‘collaged aesthetic’…
Used an old cinema as a ‘landscape’ for one film.
How is the work shown? Often in galleries, but she makes 2 edits…. One for the gallery (4 channel) and one for eg film festivals (single channel). Think cleverly about how you can have multiple ways your work can be shown.
As an expanded practitioner, she incorporates her teaching and learning expertise into her work, although she tries not to be didactic. She does now find herself being rather obsessive!
(Think about a video lecture as a form of collage…)