by EMILY TUTTLEBURY
A room full of new people poses a strange tension for an artist. A party, careers evening, a date; I am asked what I study and I feel an inevitable, familiar nervousness as I await silent judgement, after admitting, somewhat trepidatiously, that I study art.
It is almost taboo to be pursuing a creative subject at university level; often I catch myself worrying that people will assume there were no other pathways open to me and that I must have been academically challenged to have ended up studying ‘art’; even the word itself carries a strange weight of ambiguity. I know what it means to me but I often wonder what it evokes for others: vast studios splattered in paint and wax and human hair? The Turner Prize? Vulgar performances without narrative? An angry rebellion from a disillusioned youth with no fixed path? Perhaps just a lot of posing.
For me, nothing could be further from the truth. An only child with a vivid imagination, I inhabited fantasy worlds for most of my youth; escaping that which challenged me, extending experience where reality fell short. My love of cinema is rooted in this and I have always felt blessed to be offered an open gateway into the brilliantly vivid realities of others through film. I remember clearly the moment I discovered real cinema through David Lean’s 1946 adaptation of Great Expectations at my grandparents' house on one inclement Sunday afternoon. The clock ticked listlessly and the sky hung like a leaden pall as I watched convicts fight on mist-shrouded marshes, a spectral woman engulfed in flames and a plot twist which set that hairs on the back of my neck on end. I was five or six years old, but from this moment onwards the importance of art to me was cemented.
Art by EMILY TUTTLEBURY.
The (rather sweeping) notion of ‘modern art’ oft sets noses wrinkling and eyes rolling. It is all too easy to claim that art is not a priority in these difficult times; in fact it provides what is almost a form of Gnosticism. We may all view ourselves as Sofia, cast into the Abyss, but it is from our torment that we may draw out the most personal, raw and beautiful aspects of ourselves and cast them into a brilliant new reality of outspokenness, representation and solidarity.
None of us will ever fully comprehend all of each other’s creation. It is a moiling sea of difference and contrast, strangeness and wonder, but it is vital that we keep making, keep creating, keep designing worlds and escapist visions in a society driven now by the politics of hard logic and profit which has seeped into our schools and erred our children away from freedom of expression.
For every Damien Hirst that leaves us cold, we might discover a piece that strikes us dumb with the infinite sense of its unspoken understanding for some element within us. Countless times in cinemas have I found myself so overwhelmingly moved by aspects of films that sharing them in silent darkness amidst strangers with whom I will never discuss them has become so oppressive that I’ve almost dashed for the exit.
I love the bond between artist and viewer that is created when something resonates this deeply, a unique intimacy and recognition, though they will never meet, and it is this most distant, powerful understanding that inspires me to make art. I could pluck a perhaps much overused quote from Alan Bennet’s ‘The History Boys’ , describing how “The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought….a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you…set down by someone else…. it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” And it is this which motivates me through the many hours spent hunched over a drawing board, pen in hand, painstakingly etching frame after frame of storyboards, touch by touch and line by line, or editing sections of films that may end up on the cutting room floor.
I am currently studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, where the freedom of my course has allowed me to work in whichever media I choose. At present I am making a hand drawn pen and ink animation about the importance of art, composed of five divergent stories about the way film, literature, and music, has saved, motivated and generally buoyed my own life, and the lives of several people I know.