Photography and I have had an interesting relationship this semester. It was a constant struggle to understand why I was resisting so many processes, while falling in love with others. I’ve been feeling myself learning more towards 3D work, and slowly rejecting 2D (in my own personal practice). When I first decided to edit out painting from my choice of mediums, I was afraid and hurt that I was letting go of what first got me into art making, and what I thought I had really connected to. I understand that artists will merge from one medium to another, I had just never expected to be going towards the 3 dimensional….stuff. There was always something magnetic in wheel throwing, and any time spent in that medium became exponential; I only wanted to do more and more. A little of what scared me was I never thought of it as sculpture, I embrace the craft in it more quickly.
I thought maybe it was because I felt I was finally getting my hands into the medium, really understanding how every part was made- what’s in the clay, where does it come from, how do you make this, how do you fire it, what’s in a glaze…- however, mixing chemistry in Alternative Processes didn’t create that sort of excitement. I first thought that my merging away from 2D was because I could escape from conceptually based work to the more technical and material involved, as ceramics is more commonly referred to as a craft than Art. I realized in thinking that is I really broke down the printing process into technique, and looked towards a lot of texturized images to enjoy that texture in silver. However, you can never escape conceptual work, unless you just want to stop thinking all together, and I couldn’t let go of how I still felt about Silver Gelatin. I liked that process so much more, but what was so different about it? The reason why I love photography is because of film, and seeing that detail in the print. I guess I was grateful that to print in silver, you had already coated paper and the texture of the picture wouldn’t really change. That was something that you could/should work to in alternative process; I think the challenge lies in getting that technique down after all…. It was really exciting to see the success of others in class, I just couldn’t get myself to step up to the challenge.
During winter break of freshman year I visited an Art Center at a Matheny School in north New Jersey, a facility that worked with people having disabilities, like cerebral palsy and ms…. And their process was using a system of Facilitators- people trained to be completely neutral in the art making process, to the point where they could physically do someone else’s painting, with their full direction. All abstract work, there was paintings done by blinking the eye ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to what color to use, what texture, what kind of line…. Seeing that work, in the middle of Foundations, might have saved me from turning my back on art. I felt there was so much bullshit in “Art”, I didn’t know if any of it was real. All that conceptual talk, understandably, felt so empty; it felt like such an excuse for the artist to just do whatever they wanted to do. So there was a group of people doing that after all, and it was beautiful.
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To address what I actually decided to work on, I took this struggle in hand and wanted to make my work more representative of the internal me… Not just, ok this is what I’m going to work on for class, but how can I organize these thoughts with those thoughts and put that into a picture. I noticed that at one level it is very centered around people, which I know is vague and not immediately visually apparant in my work. Even though my pictures may come off as silent and from a point of solitude, those qualities are usually remnants of my physical presence…..wait, what does that mean. I feel like my body sitting on the couch or walking down the street is so much more different than what is going on in my head. It’s me, seeing how far away someone is from me, across the street?- but how well I do or do not know them- or care. That tv is a small box sitting in my living room, but what power does it have! The content in the pictures are what lead me through a stream of conscience, so they have a particular value to them. It’s hard to organize thoughts, and because they are so scattered that was one of my challenges.
My thoughts and writings are always considering human interactions, human natures, ha, really nothing anyone understands I guess, and mostly because I try to understand those things in myself. What responsibilities do I have as a person, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a student. I look at other people’s writings to see how they might arrive at the same conclusions but through totally different experiences.
My own writings, trying to record those thoughts, try to portray ideals that are blown-out, twisted, or ignored. There are things that order/demand our way of living, money, jobs (money), food (money), technology, distance….. we can be so fed up with it. Other times we don’t understand our relationships with loved ones… that’s life, right? Others’ writing are their own realizations of those things, many times in a sad look of our reality. I took them as other people’s questioning to what they want to know or understand, similarly like I might try to understand the nature of a pot.
I never addressed the stories behind the writings and pictures in my final project, and I know that would change a lot. But I think some could make a point about these weird fixations that “artists” make into their work. The cyanotype prints in my work that look like scribbles on a ripped out piece of notebook paper wasn’t someone just mindlessly trying to imitate writing for aestetic reasons. My brother with Down Syndrome will spend hours filling up notebooks with that writing, and who knows the story behind it. He has stacks of drawings of “rocks”: scibbles ontop of scribbles, over and over again. He’ll sit with a big book and spend a lot of time on each page- with no pictures- but he doesn’t know how to read. I know that his mind is operating at a different pace and level than ours, but he still feels this urge to repeat this one image and he has that same fixation that makes us narrow our life down to getting “that one good print.”
I spend a lot of time trying to see how my work was connected and realized that became another internal obsession. For the sake of getting work done, I accepted that they were simply my thoughts and you cannot organize or perfect those. There are connections in everything and humans just weirdly decide to focus on some and not on others.
I wish I had forced myself to work towards these conclusions sooner, though I’m glad I did now.
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I scanned and posted my work here, though I still have to put up my final project.
