Halfland; a Strand of Pearls - Speed Post: 2 of 12

“How could you reach the pearl by only looking at the sea?
If you seek the pearl, be a diver.”  — Rumi

Made a random stack of large paper pearls to string across the art space. Each pearl represents a different scene in Halfland, from large to smaller to tiny blip. They hang on a string individually and can be endlessly rearranged, in no particular size pattern, to make up the film's series.

The scene name gets written on the pearl in chalk as they are begun, until the whole strand is named and completed.

An example of a big scene might be the underwater sequence, where everyone's fish puppet gets a featured second. A smaller scene might be the bug party, if you can believe it. So many hundreds of hours for what will be no more than a 5 - 8 second sequence of noticing the insect festivities on our way to Rana's cottage. A tiny scene, such as the Queen Bee silhouette inside a pomegranate flower, leaning out to look at us, is but a Halfland moment.

It's my way of imposing a limitation on the film in order to attack its making. However many arbitrary paper pearls I made, and in what size, will dictate the total series length and scene sizes for it all. The string you see is the entire film series; we just haven't seen the scene order yet.

Over the years, I've come to think of Halfland as a string of pearls in my mind, something manageable, flexible, and switchable at will. Not locked into a more rigid system. It was my personal metaphor for the project.

Then, I started finding pearls at large in the world. It got so that every time I stepped outside, one would magically appear on the ground in front of me. Messages from somewhere, I began collecting them onto a photo kept at my desk of a woman holding a strand of pearls. I bought a bag of them after a while, so I could string them to match the scenes as they are finished.

A metaphor for focusing on one task at a time, each scene a pearl in a continuous series.