NOTES ON: STUDIO DIARY SERIES


The Studio Diaries are a series of 100 short films that we made over seven months in 2018. Each film was shot, edited and released online within a single day. Part daily diary, part sketchbook, these films capture the workings of our creative practice at our home and behind the scenes of other projects we were working on at the time. But more than simple documents, the Studio Diaries are creative thought in action, each film is in itself an investigation into the nature of creativity, moving image as an art form and the use of ourselves in our work.

It had always been one of our goals to be able to work with moving image with the same immediacy and directness that a painter paints or a poet writes, with this project we feel that we finally achieved that – not only were we now able to work very quickly and directly, we felt we had gained a certain level of fluency in the language and the craft of moving image – we had arrived at a point where we felt we could speak as ourselves through this medium.

We decided to make a series of 100 films to test the limits of our creativity, to push ourselves beyond what we thought we were capable of. We could not conceive at first how we would carry it through but we believed it was possible and that if we simply began then creativity would show the way. We never prepared anything in advance, each film materialised on the day it was made and is an honest expression of our moods, interests and activities of that day. Sometimes we would not know what we would film until the moment we clicked the record button but somehow something interesting always emerged. The act of looking through the camera became an activator of the imagination and set the creative process in motion.

The diary form was very liberating in terms of structure and narrative – the structure shaped by fixed units of entries and the narrative evolving through the process of creating them. This enabled us to have a very direct engagement with the images and subjects, exploring our interests in all directions and allowing these to lead us until they coalesced into clearer paths.

Looking back we now see what a pivotal time this was, there is our work before the Studio Diaries and the work that comes after, there's a clear distinction which this project marks. On completion of this work we wrote a letter in which we announced the realisation of our new identity, we stopped using our surnames and became two humans working as one artist. We were reborn through the making of these films and this process of personal and creative transformation is captured on screen. It was with the Studio Diaries that the final merging of our art and life took place, previously we'd only been present in our work in small ways but here we fully stepped into the frame and became both the subject and material of our art.

- Daniel & Clara, April 2022