MARA RAVINS is a Visual Artist and Storyteller working in the medium of film (as Screenwriter, Story Editor, Director, Producer) and also photography and visual art. She has worked professionally in the film industry for over 30 years, on low and high budget productions. (see Film)
ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Discovering the Extraordinary within the Ordinary.
In this time of societal upheaval, shifting relationships and uncertainty - What do we value? What do we hold dear? Where do we find Solace? Home? Safety? Hope? What new forms of self, identity, family, community, ritual or habit can we find or create beyond boundaries and old paradigms of being to experience more kindness, love, grounding and happiness? Where is the potential for genuine connection with the self, others and the world through accepting and transmuting our weaknesses, fears, moral and emotional disarray outside of the confines of judging ourselves, our actions and others as good or evil, right or wrong.
I live these questions daily and they have always informed my creative process. This allows me to find meaning through the personal interfacing with the universal through the conception of visual art as a language of communication, an act of communion and soulful connection to others and the world.
No matter how desperate, lonely and isolated one may feel, some form of grace will always enter, if one allows for that - as hope, beauty or love.
My film work continues to explore these questions with an emphasis on redemption within exile in the feature screenplay Siberian Story. My current project adapting Karin Fossum’s brilliant crime novel Den Onde Viljen to screen, explores morality and accountability after a late night foolish decision causes the accidental death of a young immigrant.
My multi-media project 100 Prayers For Those Who Watch Over Us, a work in progress of 100 6” x 6” images (60 paintings and 40 photographs with text) wherein the image informs the text, the text informs the image through an intuitive process creating metaphorical relationships, each work embodying its own inner logic, inviting open associative interpretations toward meaning.
In the medium of photography, I discover the extraordinary within the ordinary through the seduction of a moment that allows me to glimpse beauty, even amidst brutality and the banal. Beauty for me is subversive and powerful.
I have always been interested in the aesthetics of visual language, focusing on the textures, colours, spatial design, lighting and sound within each setting, environment and landscape, attentive to the finest details in their potential to create a more evocative, seductive, metaphorical, associative possibility for the viewer to experience a story through the medium of cinema. This allows me to explore the relationship between place and the emotional rendering, foreshadowing and development of a character’s or a person’s inner emotional worlds.
I remain deeply inspired by the work of Kim Ki Duk, Andrea Arnold, Xavier Dolan, Agnes Varda, Harmony Korinne, Fassbinder, Antonioni, Techine, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Jia Zhangke, Thomas Vinterberg to name a few of my favourite film artists.
My creative process is a relationship between myself and the Work. The Work is touched by Mystery. It flows through me, yet it is also of me. I never intellectually seek out a creative project. The work makes itself known. It could be an image, a word, a feeling, a sensation. It lingers, it persists, it unfolds in an organic manner. It wants to be developed, seen and heard.
The Work is demanding. It can be all consuming, intimate and intensive. To be turned inside out, to expand, to be seduced, to feel love, awe, to bravely navigate territory that takes you to new, even strange and dangerous places, to be challenged and to surrender to the process of creativity this way, is the ecstasy and the agony - a soul necessity. I am a story teller, a maker of images. It is my way of making sense of this world, of celebrating the mystery and magic of this life.
15/11/2023
