Medium: Multimedia video
Sustain is an exploration of birth, death, and rebirth. A seed is planted in the ground. It grows. It reaches towards the light. It is buried, but it emerges transformed, rising from below. This cyclical pattern of sowing and reaping, burying and growing, setting and rising, is apparent throughout nature. The work reflects my own story of near death, dependence, and life. The X-ray is of me as a premature baby, when I had heart surgery at only 9 weeks old.
I believe I was sustained, however, by the Hand of my Creator and brought to newness of life — the lingering effect of the voice of my Maker means that I am sustained by His Life. “Sustain refers to the steady state of a sound at its maximum intensity and decay is the rate at which it fades to silence” (“Envelope”, 2014:” envelope”).
I created this video using the video editing software DaVinci Resolve, and imported video footage of me digging in the ground. I drew a heart using stop-motion graphics in Krita, a digital drawing software, and incorporated it into the video and animated it to beat and move with my hand. This video took over 100 hours to complete. Many of my videos are exploratory works, where the video medium guides the process as it evolves. Some of the aesthetics in the video, were accidents that I harnessed as "happy mistakes" e.g. the technique for th drawing of the root system.
Bibliography
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “envelope”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Nov. 2014,
https://www.britannica.com/science/envelope-sound. Accessed 2 June 2022.