With my first project ‘Media Self-Portrait’ due on Monday, I gave myself a week to conceive and produce specific media (fitting the constraints) that I thought best suited me, this task, though seemingly easy, proved harder than it seemed.

For me, the obvious place to produce a fair portion of this project, was in the parklands outside the back of my house, the place I have called home all my life.

As I rode my bike along the tracks, searching for the images and sounds closest to my heart, All the things I truly wanted to express; the beauty I saw in the sun setting over the eucalyptus trees, the sweet, romantic nature of the gentle autumn air and the way that the distant smell of burning wood, meandering across the parklands of Diamond Creek, conjured up nothing but beautiful, warm images and gave a new life to thoughts I had thought in the past.

This place, to me, is my sanctuary, a place I go to clear my head,  in every tree and field fragments of my memory lie waiting to be reflected on once more.

It is a place tied to song, happiness and sadness.

And here I was again, on my bike, taking a short cut behind the wetlands, trying to ride as steadily as possible as to not jerk the camera and hopefully take a perfect 20 second video that can merely show a hint of how I feel, a hint of my identity. With every attempt I began to fully realise how impossible this would be, there is no image in the world that can capture my perspective and do justice to my thoughts and memory.

But then again, revealing my inner thoughts and memory wasn’t the aim of the project? My aim is to create a self-portrait through photo’s, videos and sound recordings. Regardless of what auto-biographical art I make, there will always be a difference between perception and truth. I am not trying to replicate how I truly feel; but how I want others to feel about me. I’m creating a self-image for myself based off my own judgements and just hoping to get as close to the truth as possible, even though I know with a camera, in this particular scenario, I can’t.

As the sun lowered below the horizon, and darkness fell, I continued to ride and I returned home in love with a place I’d fallen for so many times, leaving the burden of my artistic frustration in the fields and trees.