Specimens of Summer is an exploration of both the flora and undercurrent of transition that is inevitable as the seasons change.
Seasonal transitions have been a focal point of my life for as long as I can remember: watching the beautiful summer blooms turn to seed, or the wilted leaves harden and crisp away into nothing.
As my husband and I prepare to move into a more urban setting after a life of being in the midst of more natural beauty, I found this to be an important study – a mapping of the place I am leaving. I wanted to go back to the very basics of photography when the cyanotype was used to record plant life in order to study it. My collection is as much a mapping of my mind as it is a recording of physical life transitioning to nothingness.
screenprinted text, cyanotype, found materials
cyanotype, van dyke brown, gum bichromate (alternative process/non-silver photography), found materials
2012-2015
thesis exhibition
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, April 2012
Thought Swarm is the elucidation of the overarching concept I worked through my time in graduate school. It stands as an umbrella piece, holding answers to the questions that I began to ask myself and find myself still asking as I create now -- What do thoughts look like? How do they feel? How do they move and how much do they weigh? With this piece I was able to explore this concept more completely. The process of dissecting the book (panels as pages) while also considering three-dimensionality, tactility, and the use of overlapping text symbolizes the way thoughts move, look and feel.
The swarm consists of dowels wrapped in this text. The text is train of thought that I wrote out in pen. I then burned those positives onto screens from which to print. The density that occurs from printing layer over layer mimics times of heavy thought. Screenprinting because of it’s quickness, acts as a support of this idea. Once the dowels were wrapped I plugged the holes that had been drilled, sometimes filling them with dowels dense with words, sometimes the dowels were painted black, other times I left the holes empty. This variation speaks to the variation of thoughts and thought patterns within my own mind.
I researched swarms and flocks as well as organization and order within other natural systems (such as schools of fish, crowds of people, and herds of animals.) I have found some truth in relating thoughts: an elusive, seemingly order-less and etherial subject to order that occurs among honey bees and starlings. At times these groupings hold an inherent order, as with a swarm. Early 20th century German naturalist, Maurice Maeterlinck, attempted “to describe how a crowded colony divides it’s population and establishes a second hive. This coordinated mass exodus is called the swarm.” A human swarm seems like a considerably less orderly event. I am drawn to finding order in the order-less. Sometimes even imposing order to better create a visual manifestation of my ideas.
from thesis exhibition: Thought Swarm
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, April 2012
In Progress::MFA II Book Arts/Printmaking Works in Progress
Gallery 224, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
Thoughts are dense and undifferentiated. How do we push one away in favor of another? I am interested in the density of thought and how it transitions into written word. What do my thoughts look like? How do they feel overtime? How do we choose what to say and write?
In Timelines, I began writing fields of words, turning thoughts into lines of text one over the other until they become mostly illegible. The action of writing helps me to understand the space between thought and word. The line of thread created by the sewing machine mimics the action of writing. In this repetition I find clarity, a question or a fragment, something truthful.
The minutia of the everyday consume us and become the narrative of our consciousness. This narrative has been central to my most recent work.
Other Stories::MFA I Book Arts/Printmaking Works in Progress
Gallery 224, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
I am drawn to the passage of time, charting it as a way of recording the feeling of transition, progression, and growth that occur as in a minute, a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. I think about time as an accumulation of parts that form a whole and with this wholeness comes an understanding of a larger picture, depth, and truth. I seek wholeness while trying to understand and appreciate the parts of which it is made.
