JESS BLANDFORD

What am I doing for my degree show? It’s the question that consumes me day and night at the moment.

I am making a film, or a series of films, to create an installation about a hamlet in Suffolk called Easton Bavents which is suffering from one of the fastest coastal erosion rates in England. 14 houses out of 28 have been lost to the sea since the war. An 80 year old man who lives there called Peter Boggis has been making his own enormous (and controversial) sea defenses to try to keep the sea at bay.

I’ve been there a number of times and spent a week there filming the place and the people. I’ve collected hours and hours of material, and am now fully embroiled in the process of sorting out what to include and what to leave out. The leaving out is the hard bit. Mostly because I love all the stories people told me. Stories of the sea. Stories of their families. Stories of the land. Stories of their homes.

But I know I have to decide which themes to focus on.

I’m interested in the precariousness of everyday structures that we usually think of as certain and solid (“safe as houses” or “the land beneath our feet”), and how that relates to our notions of home. But I also have lots of stories about the whims of the sea, which I see as a metaphor for our relationship to the unpredictable in our lives.

Maybe I should focus on the themes of fighting the inevitable? Exploring whether it’s about futility, or whether it’s the struggle that matters.
Or perhaps the strongest work would be about value. Which things we decide are worth preserving and which we let go of. How we decide what matters and what doesn’t.

This of course all echoes the creative process that I’m trying to go through to decide what to make. How do I decide which bits are valuable and which ideas get discarded? How much do I structure my approach or how much do I allow something to just happen? Is it a struggle and something to battle with? Or will it somehow just naturally emerge?

Time I guess will tell.