This Is Where I Came In...

LYON 8TH DECEMBER

There are those of us who hang on Seth Apter's every blogword and would probably walk to the ends of cyberspace with him (but not in a creepy, stalking kind of way, you understand). So when I read the title of his last Altered Page posting: Buried Treasure: a call for creative collaborators, my first though was "Oh bloomin' 'eck! He wants us to dig up our gardens now and I've only just got the lawn looking nice and I was planning to clean the pond out". With relief, I read Seth's suggestion that we re-post a few of of our earlier blog offerings that he might have missed. As some of you know, I began blogging in January when I had just made my first ever digital collage (posted above) and was a like a child who had come home from school with her first painting: I wanted to share my work with the world. However, I was really frightened that it/I would be rejected. It took me a couple of days to write a paragraph to accompany the image above because at that time, I wasn't at all confident about expressing myself with words. Since then, a number of you have commented on how much you enjoy reading about some of the ideas behind my work and so I hope that this post will be of interest, as I'm taking the opportunity to reflect a little.

The collage above comprises items extracted from photographs taken at the annual festival of lights in Lyon, France, together with a background that I made and elements from digital scrap kits, resized and recoloured. It was not my initial impulse to create a sinister image, but when I saw how my choices were leading in that direction, I allowed myself to go with it. Looking at it now, I can see clearly that it very accurately reflects my state of mind at that time: anger, creative frustration, feeling trapped on a very dark emotional place but as in a dream where you scream and nothing comes out. OK, I've only just thought of that: Seth, do you want a fee for therapy?



FROZEN

If you had no name, if you had no history If you had no books, if you had no family
If it were only you, naked on the grass
Who would you be then? This is what he asked.
And I said I wasn't really sure but I would probably be cold
And now I'm freezing
Freezing

Words by Suzanne Vega, from Songs of Liquid Days by Phillip Glass

I get bored very easily, so after creating the Lyon image, I wanted to try something completely different. Last January was very cold and as I Iistened to Phillip Glass's Songs From Liquid Days, whilst making an ATC with a photograph of me, aged about four and looking so vulnerable, the words of the sad but very beautiful song Frozen really got under my skin and I felt compelled to create something that depicted the emotional space that it suggested to me.
The photograph was actually taken at a Christmas party, so after extracting myself from it, I lost myself in a snowstorm by means of several overlaid layers of digital paper. As I have a love/hate relationship with text in images, I posted an alternative version, without text in my Flickr gallery. That said, the words of this song have echoed through much of my subsequent work.


FORGETTING

Prompted by a quote from Matthew Arnold:
And We Forget because we must and not because we will.

Soon after her eighth birthday, my mother lost almost all contact with her parents and has often told me that she has no feelings for them. And yet, she has kept safe this fragment of a letter that my grandfather wrote to her when she was eighteen and had just become engaged. That year, Mum and Dad went to Skegness together and Dad took the lovely photograph. I have placed another object in the box, for someone else.
The box was constructed from some photographs that I took of the side of a railway wagon and a rusty water tank.

I PUT THIS MOMENT HERE

I read somewhere that Mark Rothko did not consider his paintings to be abstract at all because he was painting images of emotions. Certainly, as a sufferer from depression, I have stood in front of his work and wept tears of recognition. This page was created when I was very, very low. The central photograph was taken in Lapland. As I worked, I was thinking about Sami art and listening to the evocative music of Signur Ros and Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree. When I'm making a layout or image, I spend most of my time taking things OFF a page, rather than adding them. In this instance, there was eventually nothing left but what you see and a piece of digital ric-rac braid: I could probably write a book about that wretched piece of ric-rac and its emotional significance. What seemed like hours were spent moving it around the page before concluding that it was, in fact, just one detail too many so into the digital waste paper bin it went.
After making this image, I realised that without meaning to, I had created a piece of art journalling, so exactly did it convey to me how I had been feeling. I felt an incredible sense of relief and could move on because I could now look at how I felt and begin to wonder what was around the next corner.

WHITHER MUST I WANDER?

Often, when I begin an image, I don't know exactly where I'm going or what it's going to be about. In this instance, I had become obsessed with memories of photographic plaques in my grandparent's house and wanted to try to recreate them digitally. This led me to explore how I might depict the specific emotional feelings evoked by remembering my grandparents house where I lived from the age of 11: the sadness of knowing that we must move on from our childhood and the pain of looking back to times, places and people that will never come again.

The original post is here



NOW SHE IS FLYING WITH THE ANGELS (FOR CHRISTINA)

This image was my first exploration into how I might digitally recreate the techniques that I had hitherto used as a painter. My starting point was a photograph taken in a churchyard. It was put through the digital mincer and I can't remember how many layers there were but I think it was about 50. As much of my work belies the fact that I love vibrant colour, I thought I'd share this one again so that you can see it's not all doom and gloom!

Looking back now, I can see how themes have emerged though my exploration of digital scrapbooking and collage. There's a desire to create emotionally evocative spaces; themes of memory, loss and longing and most of all, there are stories, or at least, clues to stories, inviting the viewer to make their own interpretations and draw their own conclusions.

If you've stayed with me up to the end of this post, thank you for looking and reading. Without the support of those who leave comments, I would never have got this far and your responses are always welcome!

See more buried treasures here