March 2020 How I feel just now? This image is how I felt at the start , adjusting to life in self-isolation. The impact of lockdown began to hit me. No access to the darkroom is the biggest thing for me. It's like missing an old friend. I recently wrote about time spent in there, in the same way Perec wrote about exhausting a street in Paris, but I failed. I wrote instead about being in the moment in there, the performance, the ongoing dialogues between myself and the processes. Time spent watching images appear and disappear. I miss the smell, the presence of the chemicals, the atmosphere. I miss the place. Charlie asked me once if the chemicals have agency. Now I realise that for me, they do. I miss being in there with other people too, staff and students. I miss the banter and the generous sharing of knowledge, the mutual support. I just miss it..... Lockdown at home means working with existing materials, as in the title of a favourite reminiscence book, Make do and Mend. I have a new darkroom here, but I don't know it yet, I'm not comfortable in there. That will take time, I need to get to know it first. So now I'm working with old images, ones I know well. In these times of self-isolation, it feels good being surrounded by familiar things.
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February 2020 What do I see when I see this image Perec would have me count the holes in the lace Boltanski would have me reflect on my childhood Heat-Moon would have me consider the wider context Shepherd would have me feel the lace on my skin Bennett would have me consider the thingness Barthes would have me consider the punctum Berger would have me consider the reproduction Calle would have me consider the story Me, I see paths crossing through time, an anonymous trace, someone's daughter. January 2020
Would Barthes's mother image still 'prick' him if it had been badly printed? Is this a superficial or serious question? Does aesthetics have anything to do with punctum? Maybe that's my question just now. The image on the left was included in the December show, and was one of the few which I would add to my hypothetical memory suitcase. The following is as I wrote it in my sketchbook.... One very definate image with punctum for me is this one bad copy (above left). Ticks all the memory loss cliches - sailing away, fog, hazy, fading away, but that's not it for me. It's not the subject, the image represents the experience of making. Busy day in the darkroom, crowded baths, chatter / banter. Social space. New process - solarization. Developed in lith then mordancage. So the punctum of the image is the sum of the darkroom experience - the process and the banter, a day that stands out above other days, and an image that stands out above others printed that day. Unlike Barthes' image of his mother where he had no direct input to the image, has having a direct contact with the image influenced me? Bear in mind it was taken on a cold, windy day in Lewis, waiting for M to finish fishing, so not a memorable in the moment experience subject wise, memorable darkroom wise. 'Multi-layered punctum'? Counterpoint to this, the image on the right, same negative, printed on the same day, but this one doesn't speak to me in the same way. Would Barthes approve of my placing aesthetics as one element of punctum? Maybe not, but for me it matters in this case. There's always a trace left...January 2020, a new year, time to look forward and time to reflect. Hanging in my studio at home is a piece of the frock I created for the show in August 2019, a piece which reflected the narrative at the time, but which, for me, was let down by its's execution. Since the show, I've been thinking about the frock and it's relationship with time. Looking at it now, in the present, I'm also looking at time in the past, various pasts co-existing with time now. Each element of the frock is a trace of it's referent, but each element has gone through various processes to get to the now, each trace removing itself a bit more from the original. Like the act of remembering, altering each recall till eventual oblivion. The frock is in this process, through both deliberate and unintentional acts. At some point it will no longer exist physically, only traces will remain. Thinking here still needs resolving, but it is this uniqueness, multiple uniqueness's, which draw me to analogue photography in the same way I was drawn to etching many years ago. The show in December focused on the curation of my practice to date. My work with Aberdeenshire Libraries is about creating memory suitcases, used as reminiscence tools to be unpacked by residents. This can be seen as the opposite, this was a piece of work where the layers of research have been re-packed with the space as suitcase. It was also the first time sound has been introduced in the work, an additional sensory layer of spoken narratives combined over time to create disturbance in the work. Lighting too was considered in more depth than previous work, as a way to guide viewers into the piece, allowing for intimate dialogues to take place. I wont go into depth here as this has been covered in tutorials, but for me this was a pivotal point in the course, the suitcase had been packed successfully. To date, my dealings with the internet have been reserved for Facebook and Instagram, how ironic that during this period of lockdown I'm about to launch my work and thoughts for all to see. Why am I doing this? In theory it's for tutors to see work in progress during this period of isolation, but it's becoming a work in progress in itself, one of those things you know you need to do but always find an excuse..... I find it challenging to type my thoughts, pen and paper are my preferred tools, emotions much easier to convey, and harder to erase. I over-consider what I type, rehearse it over and over, and in the process the immediacy is lost. Maybe it would be better to reproduce pages from the sketchbooks, but the intimacy there is lost too. Similar to my practice, the question I'm finding increasingly interesting is how can you replicate an intimate dialogue between work and viewer on an online platform? As with all of us at the moment, it is what it is and will take time to resolve, if indeed it can. |
susan CassieRamblings of a student in self-isolation. Archives
August 2020
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