While I wound up rather enjoying this project, I did find it quite hard. Many more ambitious ideas got scrapped from the start and I had to take several hard pivots as I worked due to realistic expectations while recovering from pneumonia. Another limiting factor was simply not having access to much of my previous art, and only being able to work with what I have documented and backed up to a cloud. Traveling out of state to a storage unit was simply not something I could make work, unfortunately.

This video, like much of my art, started from a seed of an idea, and proceeded to grow and veer wildly while I was mostly along for the ride, trying to keep things relatively coherent. I started with the henna concept, as it’s an art form I connect with culturally, even if I hadn’t used it in over a decade. The execution was honestly only moderately successful, but it did help me anchor my narrative. As I was looking through my artwork for things of interest, I did realize that while my photography and figure drawing is the best documented, my room is a rather great example of my more unconventional work, and from there I branched into the prop project I’d put on hold. The script I simply ad-libbed to the video, then adjusted slightly for timing purposes. Overall, I find the end result fairly charming, though I do wish I had access to much more of my old work to build it from. If nothing else this project is inspiration to better catalogue and document my work as I make it!