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LIBRARY
VISCERAL
LANDSCAPES
BOTANOMY
TRAVEL
MILO
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These pictures began
in the winter while I was missing my garden. In February, the garden
catalogues start showing up in the mail, making the contrast between
the still, gray white brown landscape outside all the more poignant. I
cut out the flowers I was missing, taped them on the dead stalks in my
yard and took
pictures of them using an old Polaroid camera from the 1970’s.
Sometimes Polaroid is just the right medicine- instant gratification and
lots of interesting surprises. The film acted slowly in the winter cold
and tended to
develop only half way, solarizing (reversing) the lightest tones. These
dark Victorian-looking landscapes came across as other worldly, more
like drawings of a place where summer and winter exist simultaneously,
where twighlight holds day and night in an odd balance, where water, sky
and earth trade places.
I toned the prints in blue and sepia, playing up the confusion and
harmony in the natural world. Later, after an encaustics workshop I
experimented with these
images layered in bees wax with drawings inscribed in the surfaces. This
process has obscured the work’s photographic origins, moving more
toward the family of
printmaking and drawing.
The photographs are toned, colored, mounted on wood and then sealed in
translucent encaustic medium (bees wax w/ a resin hardner). I use
etching tools to draw the verdant seasons on top of snowy landscapes,
filling the etched lines with oil color. Several layers build an
interpreted place, season and time of day.
On reflection, I can see this work as an illustration of my three-year
struggle to get pregnant the body’s and the land’s barrenness and
fertility in the same thought.
I wonder how the work will change as a result of my husband’s and my
decision to adopt. I am working through another winter, shooting the
snow and scratching away in the studio, making art in anticipation of
the phone call to come and get our baby.
 
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