Developing

This week I had the type of day that I dreamed about last winter when I was planning my residency at Fruitlands Museum. It would be a day of sunshine, beautiful scenery and engaging work on something fun — and that's exactly how it happened this past Wednesday.

I've always wanted to experiment with cyanotypes and anthotypes and decided to take advantage of  the perfect weather conditions we were finally experiencing. 

Anthotype is a very delicate photographic process that uses the photosensitive material of plants found in the garden to create a photographic image. All you need to add is water, sunshine and a lot of patience and time.

The plants are crushed and mixed with alcohol or water to make a light sensitive emulsion. Watercolor paper is coated with the emulsion and image can be created by exposing the paper under the sun for a few days or weeks. The plant juice undergoes chemical or physical changes when it is exposed to light, changing its color. Some fade and some darken.

I worked with marigold petals from my garden (above), blueberries and goldenrod from the meadows at Fruitlands. With my mortar and pestle I ground up the petals adding only drops of denatured alcohol to create a paste. Then I strained with cheesecloth to remove the solids and brushed the remaining liquid dye onto watercolor paper. After the paper dried, I placed a sage leaf from the Shaker Garden to create a photogram, assembled the contact frame and set in the sun to expose. I had enough to create a second photogram from an artifact that I found entrance of the longhouse - some fur from the hide of an animal. According to one of the interpreters it could be skunk or could be deer. I'm expecting to have something to show after a couple of weeks of exposure to strong sun.

My darkroom was the Longhouse at the museum:
The Native American longhouse used to teach children and familes about the way Natives lived in harmony with nature and the changing seasons. For thousands of years, Native people in this area would have lived in houses made with tree bark, saplings and other plants. We made this longhouse using traditional tools to gather locally available building materials.

 

I set up a laboratory outside on the grass and the inside provided the perfect shelter when I needed to be away from the strong sun. In the photo above you can see my impromptu darkroom... two opaque black plastic contractor bags from Home Depot... just the right thing to block light and allow the dyes to dry before assembling the contact frames and exposing to the sun.

Also experimented with cyanotypes in an attempt to capture some shadows from HIVE. These were not quite as successful but I gleaned some information to bring the idea forward. It might be best to try this in a controlled in-studio setting using UV lights instead. There were too many variables in conditions between exposures to create anything worth saving. But it was fascinating to watch the development of image happen right before your eyes. Want to continue this for sure.

I plan to keep working with anthotype and hope to create images of and with objects at Fruitlands. I'm attracted to the slowness of it - the long exposures, the ritual of mashing, the methodology to the process, the simplicity of the ingredients. 

This residency is a gift. I am affected by the culture and heritage here with only a few short months left to take it all in....

Naturing

Day 5 Fisches and birds / Paul Klee 1926

 

I'm in that in between space of contemplation, and hopefully soon to be, revelation. That place where you need to take an inventory of your musings to find direction. Sometimes this is anxiety provoking and feels aimless, but this time I'm having fun with it. Especially with several exciting commitments already in place for 2013.

Yesterday I visited the Paul Klee exhibit at the McMullen Museum, Boston College.  I was impressed by how much of a theorist Klee was with his Bauhaus teachings and prolific diary entries. Sometimes these shows can seem dated and that's how I felt at first with this one. It was presented academically, which stole some of the thunder in experiencing the artwork, with labels requiring too many paragraphs to provide context. It becomes meaningful, however, when you place him within the historical context of the early 20th century and recognize how his philosophies created a framework for contemporary art.

One thing that repeatedly strikes me is how similar the struggles are with artists across all time periods. With Klee, one of his interests was the abstraction of nature and not the accurate representation of the physical elements. "Not the skin of things... Nature naturing". Believing that humans were part of this nature his artworks also represented themes of fear, dissonance, and towards the end of his life, physical disability and mortality.

Another subject of his that keeps bopping around in my head is one where he talks about individual vs. dividual. First, I learned a new word: di-vid-u-al  1. divisible or divided  2. separate; dinstinct   3. distributed; shared. For instance, scales on a fish are dividual, distinct elements of the whole fish. The fish, however, is in-di-vid-u-al: 1. not divisible  2. a group considered as a unit. The scales can exist on their own. The fish cannot exist without the scales, or it's head or fins for that matter either. 

I definitely can identify with this, especially when you combine it with his feeling that art should be "imbibed by and impregnated with evidence of the process". In my case, the meditative process and incremental building of units into larger wholes to express the intangible.

Well, I'm off to sit with my random, unorganized thoughts. Thoughts about human nature, process, social engagement, design and the transcendence of making - all topics that I look forward to have bopping around in my head for quite some time.