Tag: dreaminess

experimenting with images and text, book making, layers of meaning

I’m continuing to experiment with putting/printing my photos onto paper and adding handwritten text. I’m going to scan the pages, print them, add more layers of images and text, scan them again, print them again, see what that does. I’m going to try printing directly onto grid or lined paper from from notebooks like the one below, instead of just onto regular white copy paper. I want to create a book to present images of most of the self-portraits from this project, along with the text taken from the OnlyFans captions.

I like taking the captions and writing them by hand, breaking them up and singling out certain words or building upon them with new words. I’ve also been physically cutting up some of the paper that I’ve written text on to, which distorts things a little and offers additional layers of meaning. I like the physical element of this way of making. As in, I could create layers of text/images digitally but I like doing it by hand, the writing and cutting up and scanning and printing.

class 11/04/24, research paper ideas

In class we talked about the research paper. I keep thinking that I want to write about Francesca Woodman, I have felt an affinity with her and her work for a long time. But I don’t know what I would want to research specifically. Some thoughts:

  • I relate to her interest in the body. I’m interested in using the body as one’s work, which she also did. And she often photographed her body in a way that explored/depicted physical interactions with her own flesh. Distortion. Subtle discomfort. Clothes pegs on her stomach and breasts, a telephone cord in her mouth.

  • Her photographs are often analysed through the lens of her suicide. Her death and cause of death are often projected onto all of her work, her work is read as her attempt to “deal with” mental illness or something. There is something compelling to me about the way people try to psychoanalyse her through her work, especially when she herself said that her main concern was composition not emotion.

  • When I look at her photographs I feel relieved. I think this happens because she was able to create this uncanny sense of balance or visual “rightness” but she did this through the apparent awkwardness and visual imbalance of the composition. She often privileges space in her compositions, she will photograph herself in an intriguing pose but her body will be positioned right on the edge of frame, with most of the photograph taken up by the room she’s in. Things are often off-centre but in a way that makes perfect sense.

  • I think she was interested in dreaminess, mirrors and angels, as am I.

  • I think often about what kind of work she would have continued to make if she had lived longer.

  • I perceive a kind of tension between a certain presentation of “candidness” and a very deliberate stylisation that she creates in her photographs and it’s something that I think comes up in my photographs too.

  • The blur and the glow. Her photographs have these. I’m also interested in these, my photographs have them too. I bought a monograph of her work from a gallery in Paris and when I read this quote from her my heart beat so fast: “And as Woodman herself wrote in an undated diary, ‘A while ago my pictures started getting smaller and smaller – now they are getting whiter and whiter and soon there will just be small … areas of glow.'”

Sermon on the Body 

I’m making Sermon on the Body into a physical book/object. My visual references are: office supplies, hotel stationary, DIY wedding aesthetics, diary-keeping, scrapbooking, solitude, dreaminess, fantasy, being a girl. I’m typing each of the 365 poems (or each stanza of the 365 stanza poem) onto a single page each, decorating each page and then using a ring binder folder to fasten them together. I’m using the same font and font size (Times New Roman, 12) that I used when I originally wrote the poem/s. I will also decorate the front and back covers of the folder. I want to create a book that is big and heavy and delicate, so that it feels like a bible. I don’t want it to feel polished or sophisticated but I want it to feel precious.