Tara McCabe

Artist statement

Hello, I’m Tara McCabe, an aspiring artist based in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. I predominantly specialise in film as my future career path, I want to attend Bournemouth film school once I complete my A levels. Art has always been an interest of mine throughout the years and my passion has further grown after starting the ‘Golden record’ project. During this project, we covered multiple different topics including texts, sounds, images and moving image which were all related to themes of senses, habitat and journey.

My main theme I related my work to during this project was senses, I explored this theme by using the outdoors and my surroundings as my main feature. I used this theme with text, sounds and images whereas for moving images I used the theme habitat, my outcome for moving images was a stop motion of objects in a bedroom “coming to life”. I particularly liked working in this format because of how involving it can be. It can be a time consuming process but the outcome is worth it as you can see everything coming together and achieving the sense of inanimate objects “coming to life”.

During this project, I took artist inspiration from a handful of different artists including: Cristobal Leon who is a filmmaker and a visual artist, my favourite work of his was his stop motion called ‘Lucia’. I really liked this piece of work because of the creepy element to it, the sound of the girls voice gave a chilling element to it but the story she was telling was not scary.

For our first project, we had to explore the format of sounds using the theme of senses. My project partner and I decided to experiment with sounds from the outside world including snapping branches, walking on leaves and crackling firewood to capture these senses.

With senses being my main theme during this project,I continued this using the outside world as my model. Most of the pictures taken link to sounds: leaves, stones and broken wood.

For this section of the project, moving images, I decided to switch my theme to habitat, making a stop motion involving inanimate objects “having a life of their own”. This was my favourite part of the project because film has always been a deep interest of mine and I enjoyed making this.

For my final outcome I decided to combine three outcomes I produced during this project: moving pictures, text and sound.

For this part of the project, we focused on text, which included writing our own ‘Ekphrasis poem’ in response to an art work that we like. I chose the painting of Ophelia by john Everett Millais based of Shakespeare’s play of ‘Hamlet’. the reason I chose this piece of work is because I felt it fit well with the theme of senses, being outdoors in a body of water surrounded by flowers and foliage.

In conclusion, I enjoyed working on this project and exploring different formats of work and discovering different ways to progress my future projects and expanding my ideas.