Can ugly truths be beautiful? I wondered this as I watched a bulky Palestinian from Jenin, dressed in a white vest, combat pants and sandals, smack a small scale model building with a mallet all day long, until all that was left was a pile of grey rubble.
Three of us: the muscles from Jenin, a friend and I, spent the whole day in the studio room, working together to help create the piece which will one day be a work of art. The job I had in the process involved repetitive actions with a camera, and although I had to concentrate on technical accuracies, there were many seconds within half minute intervals where my mind could wander free. Perhaps the nearest thing to working on a production line in life experience to date.
I'm always surprised at the beauty to be found in the ugliness surrounding us. The beautiful faces of the gypsy girls I photographed, as they pitched their tent on a rubbish dump outside Amman, their colourful clothing matching other fragments in the trash. The soft contrast of a line of washing wafting against a background of mud buildings or white tents in a refugee camp. The washing line a small symbol of human survival and perseverance. The ugly skeleton of an unfinished office block reaching into the sky and framing the cityscape behind.
The day in the studio was no different. We were shut inside a dusty studio for most of the day watching an act of physical destruction take place. A model of a building decintegrated before our eyes, storey by storey. Even our conversations reflected the inescapable anguish in this patch of contested history and land. The muscles from Jenin had lost two of his brothers in the first Palestinian intifada, and 18 of his first cousins later on. One of the cousins was arrested and had all his fingernails pulled out in an Israeli prison, before he took his own life in a suicide strike. As I filmed him slowly destroy the building - I wondered what was running through his mind, and also the mind of the artist - his family also trapped within one of the world's most brutal conflicts.
But what surprised me most was the beauty in the day spent in this way. And the strange beauty to be found in the process of the frame by frame demolition of a grey-hued building against a white backdrop, and the even more surprising appeal of the pile of rubble at the end of it all.
I am yet to listen to Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures about what makes art good, but in a snippet of his I read in the FT, he says: Our idea of beauty is constructed, by family, friends, education, nationality, race, religion, politics, all these things.' It's not something that can ever be scientifically proven. Beauty is subjective.
But I wondered in that dusty studio, if beauty isn't almost always found in a place where someone is being completely honest and true to themselves - particularly when combined with skill and thought and a careful process behind it.
Certain truths ring truer to us as individuals at different stages of life, making our tastes and interpretations of beauty, change as we grow. It helps if you believe in it, of course.
And for me, this dusty day of demolition was another little glimpse of beauty in a surprising place.
Three of us: the muscles from Jenin, a friend and I, spent the whole day in the studio room, working together to help create the piece which will one day be a work of art. The job I had in the process involved repetitive actions with a camera, and although I had to concentrate on technical accuracies, there were many seconds within half minute intervals where my mind could wander free. Perhaps the nearest thing to working on a production line in life experience to date.
I'm always surprised at the beauty to be found in the ugliness surrounding us. The beautiful faces of the gypsy girls I photographed, as they pitched their tent on a rubbish dump outside Amman, their colourful clothing matching other fragments in the trash. The soft contrast of a line of washing wafting against a background of mud buildings or white tents in a refugee camp. The washing line a small symbol of human survival and perseverance. The ugly skeleton of an unfinished office block reaching into the sky and framing the cityscape behind.
The day in the studio was no different. We were shut inside a dusty studio for most of the day watching an act of physical destruction take place. A model of a building decintegrated before our eyes, storey by storey. Even our conversations reflected the inescapable anguish in this patch of contested history and land. The muscles from Jenin had lost two of his brothers in the first Palestinian intifada, and 18 of his first cousins later on. One of the cousins was arrested and had all his fingernails pulled out in an Israeli prison, before he took his own life in a suicide strike. As I filmed him slowly destroy the building - I wondered what was running through his mind, and also the mind of the artist - his family also trapped within one of the world's most brutal conflicts.
But what surprised me most was the beauty in the day spent in this way. And the strange beauty to be found in the process of the frame by frame demolition of a grey-hued building against a white backdrop, and the even more surprising appeal of the pile of rubble at the end of it all.
I am yet to listen to Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures about what makes art good, but in a snippet of his I read in the FT, he says: Our idea of beauty is constructed, by family, friends, education, nationality, race, religion, politics, all these things.' It's not something that can ever be scientifically proven. Beauty is subjective.
But I wondered in that dusty studio, if beauty isn't almost always found in a place where someone is being completely honest and true to themselves - particularly when combined with skill and thought and a careful process behind it.
Certain truths ring truer to us as individuals at different stages of life, making our tastes and interpretations of beauty, change as we grow. It helps if you believe in it, of course.
And for me, this dusty day of demolition was another little glimpse of beauty in a surprising place.
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