These weeks since the last post have been productive. The dreamy, blue, watery-heavenly images are starting to become a reality thanks to the gerbil tank, a very sunny day, and some blue food colour dropped in the water. 632 photographs later, I have a few sequences I could use for projecting onto my cast. By happy accident, I found some paper picked up in Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge 2 years ago, saying “Nowhere better than this place” I can’t remember the artist who produced it, but I have appropriated it anyway. The words emerge out of the swirls of blue-green.
Another pleasing development became obvious when handling some foot casts that I had sown grass seed into some weeks ago. I had used agar gel, which moulds beautifully into the (negative) cast, making a positive gel cast. With the grass roots growing into the gel, this cast was stable enough to pick up and photograph on perspex. I have decided to use this property, and make a whole body gel-grass cast to display above my plaster body cast – the inside, made into a positive. The grass will grow during the final show, then I may allow it gently to die, as a kind of farewell to Uni and all that it has meant to me.
Experimentation as a method in its own right really bears fruit: these outcomes look so intentional. Interesting to note that the cost of working this way is many hours spent feeling unsure, unfinished, undecided, behind the rest. A long, painful pregnancy without which the birth cannot happen.
