I enjoyed this lecture because Hetain Patel was really informative about his work, he gave interesting and clear descriptions on what his projects were about and what he aimed to achieve. Patel completed his fine art degree at Salford University where he graduated in 2003 and he has been an artist for the past 10 years. He started his career in art by creating photography and film pieces and displaying them in art galleries and he later moved on to live performance theatre by merging his work together.
One of the projects that Patel spoke about was that his Sacred Bodies project, where he took photographs of his own body that had been decorated with an Indian ritual theme using Indian materials. He explained that he was interested in Indian culture because that was where his family originated from. I found this project really interesting because it showed me how a project can be developed through photography.
Patel then went onto explain that he didn't think the photographs showed enough information about what he was trying to achieve to the viewer, so he then went onto creating film. The project he talked about was called Copy/Paste, where he hired a body artist to create an improvised henna design on his back, that was filmed and instantly projected onto a screen in front of him so that he could copy the design onto his front. This was a four hour long performance piece that took place in the Bonnington Gallery in Nottingham. I found this project really useful to learn about because I didn't really understand how film can be interpreted into a project or how you would create a performance piece. The idea that Patel was getting across was the use of non verbal communication, which I think can be displayed really well through the use of film.
This lecture was really useful for me to understand how film and media is incorporated into a project, and how it can be used to make a project come together, but I do think this lecture would have been more beneficial to the film and media students in the group.
