As I was editing the video of the ink in the water I decided to see what it would look like speeded up. It had a whole different feel to it, less calming, more violent, and so I experimented with adding some audio. I’m pleased with the result. I can trace it back its roots – the doodling, the contour lines, the attempt at suminagashi that went wrong and the inspiration that came from that, of observing ink in water, the ink and the fish tank and the curiosity to experiment with effects that I have developed since I’ve been making videos over the last few months. It’s so satisfying to see how it all connects, although I can probably say the same about most of the work that I’ve been making recently.

In many ways this video is as mesmerising as the 5 minute one of the ink moving slowly through the water. After I had increased the speed it reduced from 5 minutes to only 6 seconds, so I duplicated it over and over. The audio clip was slightly longer than the video clip and so the effect of duplication was to delay the audio on each subsequent repetition. This led to me thinking about when we know that something is coming we anticipate it and often it reduces its impact or sometimes, such as scary moments in films, even though we know it’s coming, it still makes us jump. I was then interested to see how many times it had to be repeated to get back to more or less the right place – it was 7 times (the maximum number of times that you can fold a normal piece of paper in half). My daughter didn’t notice the delay in the audio each time and so I gradually reduced the volume to draw attention to it.

The blackness and lines created by the ink remind me of Gnawing Grief in Klimt’s Frieze. The video reminds me of how grief feels – when it initially hit me it was like having the breath knocked out of my body by a monumental force, over and over, and it made me feel disconnected and out of sync with the world, which just seemed to carry on as if nothing had happened. This video encapsulates that feeling for me.

Link to Video

I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with ink in water. Next time I’ll try different sorts of inks and perhaps venture into some colour. It’s been a great learning experience well particularly in terms of working out how to apply layered effects in Capcut and also in learning how to load

the video to Vimeo instead of YouTube – the quality wasn’t that great on the latter. I think that I’d like to get more proficient at video-making and editing as well as photography as I anticpate it being a significant part of my practice in the future.