Rockana

Rockana is a personal project. It's a moving collage set to music, it has no dialogue. As described above, it started with a shoebox of detritus. I was aware I wanted to turn these dusty and discarded bits and pieces into something, possibly photographic tableaus, but I really wasn’t sure what. I didn’t push it, I waited for inspiration. Inspiration came from an illustration of a sand mandala sitting above my editing station. A depiction I’d retained from more than twenty years earlier when I’d watched monks create and destroy a sand mandala in my hometown over a few day period. Could I create a video mandala I wondered? Could I turn this junk into art, could I capture the disparate elements of my changing life and coordinate and compose them into some kind of centred circular depiction?
To inform the process I researched mandalas and mythology. In just a few nights myself and musical collaborator Andrew Muecke recorded the music. The soundtrack exists in the order it was originally recorded, no tracks were discarded. The same couldn’t be said for the filming process. It took many months of preparation and shooting and there are certainly numerous shots and set-ups left on the cutting room hard drive floor, and one small slip could ruin a time lapse series. Most of the shots were prepared and constructed before they were executed, but sometimes unexpected shadow play or the arrival bugs, ants and birds would provide a serendipitous and surprising addition.
Towards the end of the process I got very close to creating video mandala I had envisaged. But the outcome is also a form of totem, an illustration of the wastage we walk over everyday, and maybe it’s even a representation of the value of creativity…. could be any of those possibly…but I do know Rockana is Order from Chaos.