Ella Marston

Hiraeth

4D Studio Art

My work is motivated by a desire to experiment with the relationships between visuals, sound, and performance, as it relates to my experience and production of these mediums through synesthesia; synesthesia is a twisting of the senses where people see color associated with a given sense. (I see color with sounds and numbers. Sounds also have specific shape forms.) As a musician, I love working with how to represent the emotion, sound, and performance of music in a visual way, whether it be through animation, projection installation, or even still photography. My work is also heavily influenced by outer space, daydreams, and the bright colors and larger-than-life aesthetics of the 1980s.

I am very inspired by the work of Rachel Rose’s projection installations and video art relating to otherworldly spaces and sound. Barbara Morgan is another artist I draw inspiration from, although she is a film photographer and not a time-based artist; I particularly enjoy her modern dance photography and light painting photography, and although these two bodies of work were not meant to be viewed in conjunction with one another, I am very interested in the way her light painting mirrors the energy and movement that she captures in her dance photography.

My current body of work selected for this exhibition is inspired by the feeling of “hiraeth,” a word from the Welsh language that doesn’t translate directly into English very well, but has been related most closely to a feeling of homesickness, longing, or nostalgia, specifically for a place, time, home, or person, that you have never known or experienced, or that never even existed to begin with. The works I have chosen to display in “Hiraeth” abstract this feeling through otherworldly visuals inspired by outer space, memories as an object, nostalgia, found footage, animation, projection, and photography. These pieces are windows into places or times that I have both longed for, never been, and that never even existed to begin with all at once.