8 September 2025
Another bit from studio conversation today—the idea of “specificity” came up in the context of me holding my references looser and looser. I personally feel like doing so is making my work ring truer, but Edith brought up that one should be careful to not lose specificity when allowing obfuscation / fragmentation / incoherence to happen. I get her point, but I realized when she said this that specificity isn't really a concern of mine. Not anymore anyway. And it's not that I don't value it—I do, and I think recognizing it and honing in on it is a good path to meaningful work—but for me personally I suppose I have begun to cultivate an absolute trust that my instinctive choices, even during research, are doing the filtering toward specificity for me. Even grabbing screenshots from the home movies I mentioned in my last post—the act of doing so was impulsive, unthinking, acted on from the hazy peripheral germ of a spark in the back of my mind. Only afterwards was I able to retrace my steps and find a unifying factor, which was there all along despite the fact that I didn't acknowledge it until following it blindly.