Shelly's Love

Shelly Love originally trained to become a dancer/choreographer, but somewhere along the way, she got fed up with it and picked up a camera to shoot some amazing backwards films. Her unique style quickly caught on and her nine short films are screened internationally and continue to harvest awards and prizes. BELLYFLOP talked to Miss Love about the hard work of an artist, finding inspiration and the world of dreams.

Have you ever felt incapable of making work?

I think every artist has something to say about feeling blocked or not being able to make work. Personally, I don’t find making work easy, I’ve always had to work very very hard, and all the way through my twenties I felt disturbed and frustrated because I had all of this energy and I didn’t know where to direct it. I got to a point as an adult where I kind of realised: I have to do something with this, because otherwise I won’t function very well. The camera has allowed me to work closer with my imagination, so I’m just glad that I found the vehicle. I don’t necessarily know if it’s the right one, but it’s a vehicle and it allows me to be creative.

So, how are you creative?

I don’t sit down and create a full story in my head, write it, storyboard it and the whole thing. What I naturally do is that I work in the moment, a bit like when you’re devising choreography, but most filmmakers don’t work in a devised way at all, they write a story, a script, they make a storyboard - to work in a devised way is very unusual within film. Even on the shoot I’m devising to a certain degree.

You're the odd film director - do the people you work with/for know about your background in dance?

Within the filmworld they don’t know me as a dance maker they know me as a director. That’s what they accept me as. I still get work as a choreographer, but I almost feel like I don’t have that label anymore and when I make work for the camera it’s dance film or it’s arguably not dance film because there’s some movement in there, but it’s not necessarily dance film. I do feel I’m an artist, a creative person, rather than a dancer, choreographer or director, or just one thing.

Your ideas, where do they come from?

The way I get ideas is usually from an image or a color, or things that I collect and put together, which becomes a starting point and I just expand from there - I do feel a bit like a magpie sometimes. But sometimes nothing happens for weeks and I don’t feel anything and then suddenly I’m walking down the street and loads of ideas come spilling out of me - like a door opens and everything just spills out. That’s the way that I personally work, which is really difficult because to function in the real world and to work within an industry that expects you to come up with ideas quickly, which is what I’ve been doing in the past few years, means that I have to force ideas out all the time. I find that really challenging, I find it painful, I don’t sleep very much, but I have to kind of stay with something until the idea comes out. But you know, your creativity comes out of you when you’re inspired and you can’t always be inspired... although if I don’t have a deadline I get lost. I need to have a deadline otherwise my ideas continue growing and adapting just like in dance where the ideas are always moving and changing. Also, I doubt everything I do, as I said I don’t find making work easy and that’s because I’m very self-critical, I have to feel that I mean what I’m saying, so yeah if I didn’t have deadlines I would just keep changing and doubting and maybe not getting anything made, so it’s really really key to be forced sometimes.

But when you have to force out those ideas isn’t it hard to keep the artistry in your work?

Yeah, I have felt that compromise quite a lot when I do music videos, and have actually learned that sometimes you have to think this is a job and other times this is art, because a music video is a job that you’re making for another artist and a record company.

So you have to respect that.

Certainly, and they won’t respect you, if you don’t respect them. As soon as you put your work in the industry and you have a client it becomes about what the client wants and you have to deliver that, so I think it’s just being realistic. You know, I’m not going to go out and make a really horrible cheesy cheesy cheesy piece of work... hopefully. But sometimes you have to compromise because you need to earn a living, and if I can do a job within the industry that may not feel great, but on the other hand give me a few months off where I can concentrate on the work I want to do, and ultimately that’s what drives me, then it’s fine. It’s the only way for me right now.

Change of subject. Do you daydream a lot?

Of course. Are you kidding me?

No. Nope.

I have very powerfull dreams in general, and that realm of the imagination and dreams is something I’m really interested in, something I like to delve into - it excites me. The fantasy and psychological world is something that I will continue to work with, because it’s exploring that other place. And the fact that a lot of my work is manipulated in some way, like I’ve changed the speed or the direction of it or something, it’s instantly an altered state - it’s not in the real world and there’s something about that language which expresses something psychological or fantasy based.

Yeah, that’s the thing; to me your work is very much a mix between fantasy and reality...

An example is ‘Little White Bird’, where I researched and explored the ideas of a child’s imagination, both the dark side and the light side of the imagination. In the wholehearted happy naïve world there’s also this awareness of the other and of fear, so when I worked with 7 year-old Willow we talked together about our dreams and daydreams, and she would describe something very light and cheerful and then suddenly introduce a whitch or a goblin and then be really scared, which grabbed my imagination. It was a very playful process and the piece that came out of it in the end was quite dark, but also very light and beautiful - and that signature, that style seems to be in most of my work.

How was your imagination when you were just 7 years old yourself?

When I was little my mum went to work nightshifts at the hospital and my dad used to let me stay up late, and that was in the 70’s and there was a lot of quite odd and surreal tv on at that time, and I saw a lot of things that affected me, not in a bad way, but creatively it became part of my language. My imagination at that time could be quite dark, and I was very scared sometimes - I watched ‘The Shining’ when I was only 7 - and now if I watch a horror film I’m terrified, but it interested and still interests me, I don’t want to not look. But that’s the way I see life as well, I’m very conscious of how amazing it is, but also the reality - it’s about what you choose to see and I’m not scared to go to those places and look at those things, because I think it’s just part of exploring your own nature as a human being.

Nice.

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