For the summer quarter, I thought I was going to create embroidered polaroids that explored my relationship to Maple Hills, the rural neighborhood I grew up in and thought I’d never return to. But after two weeks, I was already sick of the whole concept. I was trying to “therapize” my experience and put a neat little bow on it. To be able to say after ten weeks, “Ah! I live in this beautiful place. I am grateful. NEXT PROJECT, PLEASE!” But that’s not how things work, Karen. Duhhhhhhhhhh …. I can see my friend Lisa rolling her eyes at me right now.
Luckily, I quickly saw the error in my approach, and my professor was extremely kind about my change of direction. Over the past year, several of my friends have sent me this Instagram reel. It’s a beautiful and modern interpretation of a Polaroid emulsion lift. You can read more about that process here. Since I had just created a bunch of Polaroids I had no idea what to do with, and I didn’t want to waste them, I started experimenting.
This led me to ask myself a lot of “what if” questions. What if I got super close to that bright orange flower over there? What would these blurry snapshots look like on a cyanotype? What if I just went ahead and made a mess? What if I just let go?
Let me tell you right now, all these what-ifs led to a maze of more questions. And I thought I had gotten myself totally lost. By midterms, I was afraid that I had made more mess than art. But I had to keep moving forward and trust the process. God, I hate saying that. I felt a lot while making these prints. I felt connected to the “flow” in ways I hadn’t felt since early on in my photography practice. Would my classmates and professors see that in the images, though?
I won’t say more, because I want you to judge the images for yourself. Yeah, yeah, cop out. But I fear that if I dive too much further into the process, you won’t experience these images for yourself. And for me, that is really important.
I had to let go of many self-imposed expectations and narratives to create this work. It is incredibly different than anything I have ever created. And I am really looking forward to what “trusting the process” looks like in the future.
Cheers! and Love!