Angeliska introduces this video on her blog with these words:

This completely blew my mind.
It changed the way I think about many, many things-
and will change my actions as well.
It’s the work and world and words
of this woman–
I believe that she is going to change the world.

I share her reaction absolutely, though I have my own reasons for being affected by the video (read on for those).

My own reactions have a lot to do with the work I’ve been doing in the last couple of days, writing up material that reviews how I created the artists’ book Turndust. In the essay I spend a while talking about how I intend this summation of the work to help guide me towards an understanding of how my artistic practice can wrk as a research practice. For that reason I compare it to scientific practices, and compare ‘experimental intention’ and ‘artistic intention’. I end up criticising myself for not having a more clearly expressed reflective practice; one that relates intimately to what I’m making yet remains ‘available’ as a more or less verbal record of my thoughts and feelings as I go through the creative process (that’s the ostensible purpose of this blog, by the way). Where this recent work seems to let me relate to the video  is in the way it depicts different ways of working with one’s environment (working is the wrong word, but it handles the relationship adequately). The woman who wrote and features in the film can show us different ways of working with the materials and forms around her, can show us clearly how different they are and yet how they share a deeply engaged relationship to the world.

I think that how I report on my own creativity is made (as it is for anyone) difficult by the need to step out of one language and into another, in somewhat the same manner as is so clearly put here. (I am not trying to hijack the film’s statement for myself, just expressing my own relationship to it and the personal thinking that it has sparked off).  What the film shows is not only the engagement with materials that the filmmaker is undergoing: it shows me that it is possible to let the medium (in this case film) document the relationship. It is as if the film is another sense that she can use to experience the material. I have been skeptical of my artwork’s ability to document my relationship with the media I’ve used, but clearly I am seeing something in this film that does help me to understand this way of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, looking. It works to document/recreate the filmmaker’s experience for me.

Turning to another aspect, the film’s point raises for me, as Im sure it does for many others, a certain discomfort around my assumptions about people who end up disabled by my casual insistence on a certain narrow band of communication and a certain narrow way of being in the world. This film’s bilingual aspect opens a valuable door for me.