The Pseudomorphs and the Celestial Bodies are built with the same parameters. The Celestials often incorporate more than three objects, but the three categories of plant, animal, manufactured all need to be represented. When I was collecting objects to make into Pseudomorphs I had many that were either circular or radially organized. These didn’t lend themselves to the visual grafting technique and so when I made my first image with round things I used layering techniques instead. There are a lot of complex and beautiful ways to layer things in Photoshop. But the resulting image, now titled “Celestial Bodies: Aldebaran,” seemed to be too different from the other Pseudomorphs, so I set it aside. Before I printed editions or framed any of these I would show proofs to visitors and I had one visitor who really responded to Aldebaran. So I decided to keep riffing on round. Many of the source images I use are scans I’ve made of actual objects. If I leave the scanner lid open to accommodate thicker objects then the light from the scanner falls off into space and in the resulting scan the object appears to be emerging from blackness. This blackness reminded me of the emptiness of space, and since many planets are uncannily spherical, my round layered things appeared to be celestial bodies. I knew I wanted to do a series of riffs on round—maybe I always think in series because I started out making books—and I decided to do 26 named for each letter of the alphabet, named after real extraterrestrial places. I have sometimes chosen colors based on their real namesakes, and if the object is a double star I sometimes make a double-round riff (like for Hadar). Whenever I have to choose an arbitrary number I try to make 26 work because I love the alphabet so much.
Part of my practice is to wander my neighborhood and pick things up. I pick things up and look very closely at them. (It is convenient to have a dog to walk with me so that this activity does not call too much attention to itself.) I try to hold on to things that are not “perfect” specimens of their kind: leaves which have been altered by insects; squashed bottle caps; damaged butterfly wings. These objects in themselves call attention to the way my mind tries to organize things into types and then impose an idea of a perfect form for that object, a form without blemishes. I try to challenge the well-worn paths of my expectations so that I can pursue the discipline of really seeing. Then I take my favorite things and put them on the scanner and scan them at a very high resolution—so high of a resolution that the scanner feels compelled to ask me if I really want to make such a large file. When I look at the scan I can see so much more, such fine detail. Every bite mark on the leaf is exquisite.
But I digress. I really want to talk about transformation because that is what some of my recent work is about. So. One way to call attention to the particularity, to the thisness, of an ordinary object is to make it into something unexpected. It is itself but also something contradictory at the same time. This is the project I undertook in the Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth (showing now at Brookland Pint on the Arts Walk.) I started with resonant objects, some of my favorite things: tools and food. I have been wanting to do something with this clothespin for a long time. And the antique potato smasher. And I fell in love with some crazy Hungarian peppers at the farmers market. Not to mention the supremely strange long purple turnip. Garlic scapes have always delighted me with their giggly squirms. The hammer was left in my previous house by the contractor who later died and I swore I would never hire another contractor because Tom was too damn wonderful to replace. No more renovations for me. But I cherish the hammer. Etc.
This is the point in my thought process where things don’t resolve, they stack up like layers of polyphony, and the resolution happens with the viewer of the work. I hope. I can only point at threads which I pulled together in these works. So here goes:
I thought first of making angels, and then of making dragons. Alchemy is the transformation of materials, of base materials into exalted materials. Tools have an aura, a quidity, an appropriateness, a beauty in good function. Food is a locus of passion and culture. Vegetables mean life, vitality, the transformation of light into energy. Tools and vegetables are of the earth. Tools are the transformation of matter into energy, energy in the sense of making. Tools are used to transform the world into the actualization of an idea (building with tools according to a plan). Food is transformed into our bodies, fuel for our bodies. Vegetables, from the earth, are transformed into food through the agency of fire, air, and water (cooking)—the backgrounds of the scrolls show the elements of fire, air, and water.
So this is as close as I can get to explaining what was going through my head when I was making these works. So come and see them at this restaurant if you can. I ate Saturday brunch at Brookland Pint. It was really good.
Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth, from Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions.
Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions
… I was creating Correspondences: Line. Some visitors to my studio have told me they enjoy hearing where some of my ideas come from and how I put them together. So here is a short bit about the image sources I’ve used in this piece. This series came about because I was finding that the photos I was capturing with my camera were not interesting enough to me to print. They are fine photos but they weren’t really doing for me what I wanted my art to do. I was capturing these images because there was a particular thing I liked about what I was seeing but the whole photo was not as interesting to me as this one bit. In this case, with Line, I had a bunch of images I had captured in which there was a line that I really like. So I decided to take a collection of lines and make a new composite image from them. When I harvested the lines I may have stretched or squished them, depending on what I needed for the final composition. Here is the final image:
Line
So some of the lines are obvious: from left to right–the gingko leaf, the maple seed helicopter, the sycamore leaf. But let’s go back to the left again, to the thin black line. See if you can find it in this source photo I shot in Italy:
Do you see the shadow on the overhanging roof tiles? I traced my line from this photo.
Okay, proceeding to the right you can see a picture of stucco with a shadow on it–look at the left edge of that portion of stucco and now look at this photo I took of the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up:
I used the horizon of the mountains to crop the edge of the stucco.
Going right some more, there is the marvelous line of the shadow of a wire I captured in Italy:
Next there is the edge of an old piece of corrugated steel that I fell in love with. Look at that line dance:
I found that our eyes want to see a landscape when we see lines horizontally, so I rotated my lines to be vertical to pull them toward abstraction.
Lastly there is the yellow calligraphic line which comes from the shadow in a photo I made at Pompeii:
This series was a breakthrough for me because I started on the path toward taking apart and putting back together photographic images based on different characteristics: material; form; pattern; organization…
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