Travel Bursary New York Trip

My third day was all about speaking at the 10x10Photobook Salon. Having been to one earlier in the year on my last trip to the US I knew it would be quite informal and a really lovely way of showing the book.

There were four of us presenting our work that evening. Virginie Rebetez with her book Out of the Blue, along with her publisher Delphine Bedel, Lucy Helton and three of her books Actions of Consequence, Transmission and her zine Fire, and me with Conversations with my mother.

There was a very receptive audience… however, it was still quite hard to talk about my work, which is so personal, to a group larger than one-to-one. Having been through it at portfolio reviews I knew this would be emotional – but I think that’s OK: it’s emotional work.

Speaking here was significant: it was my first public talk about this body of work, and I was mindful of this moment. Because I only made 16 editions I can’t send it out for review or awards, and this makes it tricky to get it out there. I didn’t do a Kickstarter…I never intended it for mass distribution but I still want people to know about it…. This Salon was a perfect way to do that – people who are really into photobooks and who take a great interest in them. Each time I show it I think – “that’s my letter to you”. I had some good conversations afterwards that continued well into the evening.

It was also great to show in the context of other wonderful – and very different – books. Virginie Rebetez book explores the disappearance of Suzanne Gloria Lyall, a young woman from Albany (NY). The content of the work creates a multi-layered narrative showing how information about someone who is not there becomes ‘property’, loss, and how we come to know someone through it… Suzanne has never been found. We were very fortunate that Suzanne’s mother was also present at the evening to talk about the work and the process of making it and I am always hugely in awe of how photographers make pieces about others with such sensitivity and tact. It’s a real long-term relationship, and Virginie has made a nuanced and care-full piece of work.

Lucy finished the evening speaking about her three books which I had been lucky enough to see in detail the day before in her studio. I was again reminded about how much the form of the book itself is another medium. I kept thinking of ceramics..the transformation from clay to vessel, and how broad that definition of vessel could be….. the book is a vessel and how that is explored is so exciting….

I have learned a lot this year about communicating this body of work. As I have moved through the last few months I have got less and less attached to needing to do some sort of ‘mass promotion’, which really doesn’t suit me or the work. This Salon was perfect. You can read about the Salon here.

My second day involved going to see artist Lucy Helton, who was also presenting the next night at the same event I was invited to talk at.

Lucy has a studio quite a long way from where I was staying…It was beautiful getting there and I started to get that feeling of hyper-awareness, when you don’t know where you are and everything is more vivid.

It was a shared space occupying the seventh floor of a large warehouse type building. I had come across Lucy’s work at Fotofest earlier that year when I had gone to Houston to undertake the portfolio reviews with my own work. Lucy had work on show as part of the Biennial – the theme was The Future of the Planet – and her work Actions of Consequence was a fictional representation of what earth might look like without human life in 200 years time. I didn’t know Lucy when I first saw it, but I totally loved it and went back to see it three times. I was reminded at the time of how much I had fallen in love with Joan Fontcuberta’s work Stranger than Fiction at the Science Museum, on show in London last year – all about constructing the narrative – and Lucy’s work, using varied viewpoints, sometimes including appropriated imagery of scientific origin – chimed with that for me. Her book, which she made using these images, is immensely good (sold out). The graphic landscapes which strike themselves across double pages have a bleak feel that avoid referencing the sublime of historical landscape painting / Caspar David Friedrich, because the position of the viewer in relation to the space is ambiguous. The special edition comes in a black acrylic case which looks like it dropped straight out of another galaxy. Instead of looking at a distance, we are in a strange world of emptiness.

I was also able to look at Transmission – a book she made using redundant fax machines (also sold out). This is presented in a cardboard tube reminiscent of time capsules. It is a great piece of work. Well thought out, articulate, form chiming with content. Again, like I said in a previous post, I think it’s interesting sometimes what I drift towards as something to enjoy because it is often completely different to what I make myself. Here minimal colours and a well thought out encyclopaedic approach is at the opposite end of the spectrum to my all-out-there-heart-on-the-sleeve textural making.

I really enjoyed sharing my work with Lucy. It was a bit like an impromptu crit and, like the day before with Elaine, it’s immensely nourishing to get input from people who quickly understand where you are coming from and give you some new references.

There is a difference for me showing work in England and showing work in America. I can’t really describe what it is exactly, but there is something about being out of my comfort zone that makes me less self-conscious…. more…. fearless maybe. It’s like, you’ve arrived from thousands of miles away, you’re not sure of the protocols, so you just kind of….ask. I don’t do that so much in the UK. I think that’s the point of residencies too – to be out of what is familiar, to be more open to some possibilities. It’s a bit like learning to read – there are the moments when you know that you are communicating, because you are saying the right words in the right order, but the sense of everything seems one step removed – like there is a pane of glass in the way.

It turned out Lucy will be visiting my home town early next year so we can meet up and I can show her where I work. A great coincidence.

Later on I also meet Delphine Bedel, a publisher presenting a new book she has worked on by Virginie Rebetez – both of them will be speaking at the same Salon as Lucy and myself. I have finally begun to make broad connections between groups of people that I have been getting to know over many years. Delphine is someone I actually met a few years ago at Photobook Bristol but I had not joined up the dots. World is big/big/small/small. Virginie has made a very moving piece entitled Out of the blue, about a young woman who just vanished one day and was never found. It’s an extraordinary story and a really interesting use of photography, playing on the way in which psychics use images of missing people to create narratives that lead in all directions.

I am really excited about this next bit coming up in my week in New York, which is all about presenting my own artist book Conversations with my mother at the Photobook Salon for 10x10Photobooks. I feel more confident about this now I have arrived and am really happy about being amongst the other book-artists. All very different practices with fascinating stories. I am also reinvigorated about exploring the book as an art form – seeing the physicality of Lucy’s book made with a fax machine in particular has been very inspiring…I am also now thinking of the ways I could go back to my work Consumed, photocopies of my mother’s food and perishables that I have been making for 4 years. This is something I am pretty sure is destined for a book…. today has really inspired me to go back and start playing about with some dummy ideas.

There are moments for me when its very much like a sunbeam breaking through a cloud – when something suddenly makes sense – even though it might have been said to me before.

This happened when I went to see one of my favourite artists as well as a Master Printer that she works with, who both gave me valuable advice.

Elaine Reichek makes work which incorporates embroidery, exploring themes which I find endlessly fascinating – often using myth to articulate contemporary concerns, making stitch marks that reference all kinds of language and ways of thought that really chime with me. In her beautiful live-work space she had pieces on the wall which were often about different forms of writing in stitch, using morse code for example. It was inspiring to meet someone who is such a significant pioneer and part of my education as an artist… I went to see her because I wanted to get a sense of the possibilities from someone who uses stitch as a conceptual mark. I showed her my artist book which incorporates a lot of mark-making by hand, and the new things I was working on…. I have felt a real need to get some sort of feedback on the notes I am scratching out, feeling my way around work so different to what I used to make when I was doing my MA….feedback from someone with huge knowledge, a historical awareness that will help me establish what has come before and where I sit …because when I make I want to locate myself. I want to know that the things that I am making have some anchors, little hooks to other things which stop them bobbing about on the sea. The recent pieces I have been making always make people say ‘tattoo’. I want to think about that in more detail. Something I read on body modification a few months ago made me question what I was doing and I wanted to think through a particular idea more deeply. I talked about it with Elaine and she pointed me in the direction of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Although I have thought about his character of Hester Prynne before I did not know of the historical reference to William Prynn, a man who was branded across the face with SL – seditious libel. This has given me some new things to think about….It was a real privilege to talk to her.

We also talked about the difference between then and now – and how this has changed…Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task….I just want to bury myself in making work.. I know it’s impossible to think like that.

A lot of what I do starts out as a ‘test’. Then I realise I really like it, but I did it ‘just to test’. Then there is this moment when you have to gulp and do it not ‘like a test’ but trust that it’s going to be worth it. I think that moment is now.

I’d like to think more about my meeting with Elaine and come back to it later…. it was very significant to me but I really need to think more about it before I write in detail.

Afterwards I went to see Judith Solodkin at Solo Impressions. Judith is a Master Printer and does some incredible work, collaborating with artists to make multiples of their unique works, often using embroidery. This was why I wanted to see her – much of my work (almost all) is now comprised of the unique object. It has posed a problem with a number of my embroidered pieces that form part of my book, Conversations with my mother. I don’t want to split them but often get asked about them. I want to keep the project together, to show it as one…I don’t know if this makes me too anxious. Judith said I had displacement anxiety about the editioning / not editioning conundrum, which made me laugh. She said: “You can do what you want as an artist….didn’t you know that?” I do love just looking at practical things like thread and drying racks. It’s very soothing…

I finished the day with managing to squeeze in a trip to the Whitney. Although I did enjoy the photographs included in a section of portraits from their permanent collection, it was their special exhibition on Carmen Herrera that I found really entrancing that afternoon. I am curious about my tastes in things I like to look at, often preferring real abstraction – which I find most strange considering what I make myself. I have wondered if it means I am cleansing my mind of noise when I look at it…certainly when I do a lot of work in the studio myself I feel like I have something akin to Snow Blindness, pin-pricking white paper with a needle, and I like to soak in colour when I look at other things.