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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
susan CassieRamblings of a student in self-isolation. Archives
August 2020
Categories |