by Shiona Herbert
Water has long inspired artists all around the world. It’s something we can all relate to and we need it to sustain life. The French based impressionists were obsessed with capturing how light reflects on the water. Hokusai’s Japanese woodblock prints of waterscapes communicated the power of water. Oil paintings by Canadian artist Carina Francioso makes us feel like we’re viewing photographs of water.
These artists have captured the essence and feeling of water in a two dimensional fashion, but what about capturing water as a sound, as a language, as a multi-modal experience? Australian based Media Artist Marianthe Loucataris has been encouraging artists of all ages to explore this very notion by capturing a multilayered experience of water via digital technology and creating meaningful artworks in the process.
To celebrate Women’s History Month, we caught up with Marianthe to hear her thoughts about a digital approach to art and why being creative is so important for young people.
What forms of art are you currently involved with?
I am a musician, composer, sound designer & media artist with a passion for community arts. I am a self-proclaimed cripple. My work has increasingly moved online, as I gradually transformed into a disabled artist with a chronic illness. Media Arts has allowed me to maintain my creative practice through working with web design, video art and creating online spaces for people to explore and connect through creativity. My passion is engaging people in the processes of creative collaboration as a means of enriching their lives and their communities. Media Arts offers me a way of using all of my creative skills to co-create a shared multi-modal language in order to meaningfully connect with others and the wider ecologies we are part of.
“Creativity is important for children as it gives them creative tools and languages to make sense of their world and themselves. ”
What creative pursuits did you engage in as a child?
I began with music as a child, piano, guitar and singing. At age 11, I joined the local Youth Theatre Company. I grew up on a farm and spent many hours on my own in dialogue with nature/the wider ecology I was part of, which has become the well spring of my creative practice.
Why is being creative so important for children?
Creativity and the arts/cultural practices offer children a means of exploring themselves and the world they inhabit and a language to express their experiences or encounters with ‘the other’. Encounters with ‘the other’ can be as mundane as, the experience of emotions moving through us, feeling the dappled light, excited calls of birds or soft breezes move through our ‘selves’. In that moment of sensory engagement, the world or ‘other’ is indistinguishable from ‘ourselves’. We become part of what poet Bayo Akomolafe calls, ‘a thicker we that extends beyond the human’.
Which female artists inspired you personally and your artistic practice?
Kate Bush for her incredible music and the theater she weaves into her work. Hildegarde von Bingen; a 13 Century mystic who was a composer, choreographer, visual artist, philosopher and writer, for her exquisite music and multi-modal way of presenting her ideas. Laurie Anderson for her ability to combine poetry, sounds, music, story and performance to express her ideas. I saw her perform live many years ago and was so inspired by her presence and the way that she wove her ideas through multi-modal creative genres. There was an incredible authenticity and humbleness in the way she performed. Shifting between the magical and the mundane in a breath.
Tell us a bit about your intrigue with water and its place in art
I have always been fascinated with the underlying patterns in life/the world. You can see these patterns when observing ripples in water, patterns in sand or the movement in clouds.
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889.
During an artist in residence in 2015 I explored multi-modal improvisation and came across the concept of Turbulent Flow in van Gogh's work. This inspired an understanding that we somehow know and experience complex scientific ideas & phenomena by engaging with the world through our senses. This fits within an animist framework where humans are not the only life with agency. In this way we can experience our lives as being in dialogue with the world, including water!
I was blessed to learn the Egyptian Rhythm Language with Egyptian drum master Ibrahim El Minyawi. Rhythms and drumming are like the bone structure of music. The traditional rhythms are the other side of the coin to the dance - a different manifestation of the same underlying structure. The notion of ‘Responding to life’ as a musician and improvising with other musicians, we can use the same principles in the process to create anything. So, a poem or song can be a response to a moment, or a photograph, or sounds, or even a video of water.
“Visuals, movement and sound are connected through the language of energy, which can be seen as a multi-modal bone structure. ”
Now It’s Your Turn… to be multi-modal!
It's always healthy to encourage young artists to be open to all kinds of media as a means of expression. For example, you can draw and paint water themes with different mediums. Water can be photographed. The sound of water can be recorded visually and in audio format. You may even take the time to listen to an audio clip of water sounds and create a poem or jot down words that come to mind while attending to it. A digital, multi-modal art method of sharing your experience of water is to create a GIF!
The Graphics Interchange Format file was devised back in 1987 as a way of reducing the size of images and animations to transfer them more easily. This is marvellous because it allows you to create a digital mosaic of images, words, and sounds. A GIF is an efficient way to express oneself on digital platforms.
Let’s give it a go!
Preparation
Think about all the water sources and experiences you have every day: drinking, bathing, flushing, filling up containers, cleaning, splashing and playing… just to list a few.
Pay attention to the sound, rhythm, and percussion of water, i.e., listen carefully to the flush of the toilet. Really attend to the noise of washing your hands. How does the sound of the water stream change as you fill up a bottle?
Process
Grab a SMART device and record brief clip of water – five seconds worth is fine.
Watch your recorded clip a few times. What is the water saying to you? Jot down a couple of words that come to mind while watching and listening to your clip.
Open up a GIF making App and follow the prompts on how to upload your clip, shave it, and layer it with water related words that came to mind earlier. (BTW, there are plenty of easy to understand YouTube clips on how to make a GIF via a GIF App.)
Save it!
Exhibition
Share your Media Art by sending your GIF to family and friends and even consider uploading it to the If Water Could Speak platform where people across the world are contributing their water GIFs to a Living Digital Mosaic.
GIF made by 10 year old Ava of Western Australia. It is part of the Living Digital Mosaic
Isn’t it amazing that nature (and even paintings of nature) inspires digital expression?
Mother nature and the man-made world of recording & editing come together so comfortably to create something completely new. Its also exciting that the traditional art technique of mosaicking can experience a modern-take through the creation of digital mosaics.
Too much art is not enough!
Click here for another great art activity to interact with water, particularly the soothing sound of rain.
