Here I am.

Okay, honesty is everything.

For the past [checks watch] five months I’ve been a bit quiet and mostly absent from the world of online. Save for a few IG stories here and there (mostly re-shares, let’s be real) I’ve avoided posting much publicly. Partly because of the horror that has been unfolding around us; I’ve been speechless — it’s come too thick and fast to comment apace with, and keep up any kind of steady emotional regulation around, but also because I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t been impacting my work.

Since I made a clear decision to return to a film / moving image practice that’s a bit more more experimental, I’ve also been a bit fastidious and nervous with my work. Neurotic might actually be a better word. Obsessed with “getting it right” before pushing the boat out, and moving the work to the next stage of development.

While I’ve spent months and years in development on projects before, this one has been different — I’ve had to work incredibly hard to remain steadfast to my commitment to not work into a traditionally narrative form. To stay in that liminal, poetic space. I’ve been head-down studying experimental film theory and poetic practice, and writing (almost) daily. But it’s been a bit of a mind-fuck staying a non-traditional course, I can’t lie. So much doubt has crept in. I’ve been tempted back towards conventional story structure so many times.

But also because I can’t avoid writing into what has been happening in the world around us, and the martial and ideological atrocities that are being committed, and that are drenching our democracies with tears and blood and fury, I have wanted to work with this urgent manna in the way I’ve always work best — at a gently oblique angle. That has meant finding the still point of focus in amidst the noise wherein I could approach the subjects of sedition, violence, censorship, ideological imperialism and creeping conservatism in a precise but indirect way. And for some reason, I’ve continued to quietly believe that point of focus was an unreasonable clinging to love, and its tender, messy visceral insistence.

Combine all this and it’s been slow, one-step-forward-two-steps-back going indeed. But I turned an interesting corner today where I realised that if I keep waiting until I have “gotten it right” to start using my voice, I might never speak in public again. So this is me, beginning to utter. To show up a little more regularly. To just be here with my messy, very not-quite-right process as I go. I be noisy now.