The Project: A Proto-Sketch
The longhand version of this project is intense, introspective and, as I've just said, long! – the images in it supporting the writing. But this balance is reversed here, and the pictures do most of the talking.
Freehand Cyanotypes – informal, joyous, and fun to make
The creative thread that runs through the project starts with cyanotype prints – particularly making freehand ones where the physicality of the process is the subject (the application of the cyanotype solution, the mark-making and evidence of my ‘hand’) as distinct from the traditional style of print (where a leaf or a plant is typically the subject). It’s a hands-on craft (one of immediacy and playfulness) that fills me with childlike excitement; it’s creative; expressive; kinaesthetic; sensory; communicative; fully present, and in the moment; physically active, mentally absorbing – in fact everything one could wish from any form art-therapy.
Freehand Cyanotypes – flanking the traditional style
Exploring and expressing the emotional impact of last year,
through the medium of collaborative images
Next comes a more deliberate, thoughtful, considered phase, with digitisation and the opportunity to make collaborative images through the medium of digital-blending in Photoshop.
For some I limited myself to the pool of new works i.e. to the range of traditional and freehand cyanotype prints (as above).
Whilst others blended cyanotypes with images from my back-catalogue – from a time ‘before the fractures’– and I imagined them as a collaboration between my now-self and my past-selves (as below).
Blending ‘new’, freehand cyanotypes with an ‘old’ digital image,
producing an emotionally expressive abstract
In terms of my wellbeing and mental health this led to three amazing, highly beneficial, initiatives.
Some groups of images resulted in opportunities to explore (and then express) the emotional impact of the last year, as the two images above.
Others to represent (and study) the connection – strictly the disconnection – between my life-before-fractures and my life-afterwards (as the triptych below, called ‘Windows on the Past’).
And others to create visual metaphors for the way that I (and my life) feel broken, since the fractures (also below, called 'Self-Repair?').
And, in many cases, something mysteriously restorative developed – a growing belief that it’s within my power, my orbit, to effect a level of self-repair.
Connection and Disconnection: Windows on the Past
A shattered life?
Opportunities for self-repair?