Circularity
At Hill End Analogue Photograph Festival in front of my argyrotype images made in Scotland.
Some compulsions become projects that circle back on themselves. I’ve just finished my fourth archive book of blogposts and I’m on a roll. I never thought that writing blogposts would become a project with an end date eight years into the future.
Just like I haven’t questioned why I feel compelled to finish my Sunday blogposts at the end of this year, knowing that the energy for writing them has suddenly wained. Archiving my posts has revealed the circularity of all my thoughts and creations.
When I spoke to my friend who is a journalist she was very succinct in her appraisal. “You are closing a circle, it’s a project and you are winding it up.” I felt that she got the essence of something that was eluding me. I hadn’t thought of my cumulative blogposts as a project.
Most projects I have done in the past have had a clear beginning with a timeline and an end in sight. I wrote a blog in 2016 for my university honours research project Paper Song. It was a weekly reflection on my experiments, academic research and creative output. I started it mid year and submitted it for my honours assessment four months later.
In 2018 I began writing long-form blogposts to document my overseas travels and first artist residency in France. The blogposts were very sporadic except for the two weeks of the artist residency in Lasalle, France which I received a Create NSW grant for. As part of my grant project I said I would write a daily blogpost of the residency, which I did.
Then in 2019 I started writing my blogposts again, but not weekly. Who knew that 2020 was around the corner and how important it became to keep writing and creating through the pandemic. Writing my posts each week became a way to stay connected to my practice and share my insights about art, art-making and artist residencies with a small list of email subscribers and artists who I had been mentoring over the years.
As I went to sleep the other night I wondered if my practice would ‘dry up’ when I stop blogging each week now that I no longer create something every day either.
Yet it was also pointed out to me that finishing this project will leave space for something new to emerge. It helps puts my mind at ease. I can now glimpse the circularity of everything as if it is through a veil, a mist of time. I look at this photo of me at Hill End and it reminds me of how I came to visual art through photography.
I’m excited about rekindling this photographic passion and possibly working in a darkroom again. I’ve been without all that darkroom equipment since my studio was flooded in 2017. I adapted by using photographic images in my artworks through alternative means of image making, from screenprints to argyrotypes and cyanotypes.
Now after my recent trip to Hill End I have fallen back in love with black and white photography, experimental photograms and all the possibilities of using my handmade paper with liquid light emulsion (which is in the post on its way to me ).
Who knows what direction my creative life will take next.
Covers of four of my finished Sunday blogposts books
