The Fleeting Moment, The Backward Glance: Week Three

It's hard not to look back as you hit mid-November, the realization slowly dawning that soon, head shaking in disbelief, you will be trying to get used to the idea of living in 2011. What could have happened, where did the time go?  I know I spend my days mostly a bit dizzy from trying to get a grip on the multiplicity of lines that connect across the globe as I meet new artists and kindred spirits, then meet up with them again a few moments later on another site in another context. It's like we are all at some sort of progressive dinner, being introduced and reintroduced under each new roof, finally realizing, not only that we have indeed met, but with so many shared interests and ideas, surely we must have known each for decades already.  This little dance happened several days ago for me with Bridgette Guerzon Mills, a mixed media/encaustic artist that I bumped into online repeatedly over such a short period of time, it was like a persistent knock at the door. Once I started making the connections, I knew I must ask Bridgette to be part of the Fleeting Moment, Backward Glance feature for The Walk In the Universe. And here she is!

What Lies Within, mixed media

Fleeting Moment: Backward Glance

The theme that Patti has chosen for this month aptly captures what motivates me to create.  Life is composed of fleeting moments.  You blink, and then its gone.  Time and memory intertwine, weaving their dance, leaving me in their wake. 

When I was a little girl, I used to find myself in moments that I never wanted to forget.  Not that these moments were even that eventful, yet I didn’t want to lose them.  I wanted to hold onto that moment of being 12 years old and running through a field of uncut grass.  Hearing the breath within my chest expand, the laughter of my sisters around me.  The smell of the sun and the dirt filling my nostrils.  The burn in my muscles as I ran through the tall grass and leaped over fallen branches.  I would close my eyes and let my senses free and memorize it all so that I could always return.

The Sky Was Full of Song, mixed media

Memory is unreliable.  Details blur, nuances get lost, and imagination and motive fill in the blanks. And so I write.  I quiet down, let myself be still, and open up my senses.  Let each one tell me their story. So that when I return and read the words, I remember.

P.S., encaustic and mixed media

My journal writing and my art allow me now to hold onto the fleeting moments.  I have kept a journal since I was a young girl and it really has become a habit that I cannot break.  If I don’t write it down I fear that I will lose the moment.  My journal entries also include collage and paint at times, allowing me to tap into feelings that sometimes cannot be expressed through words. 

February 4, 2008, visual journal entry

My mixed media paintings incorporate moments captured by my original photographs with the richness of paint, creating a bridge between two worlds - the real and the reconstructed.  I lay down layers of paint and pieces of photo transfers, papers or fibers to create depth in both form and meaning.

Lesson Plans, encaustic and mixed media

Everything I create is an aspect of myself, a composite of the fleeting moments that make up my existence thus far on this earth.  Once recorded in words or with paint, the moment stays with me, allowing both the inward and the backward glance.

“The true art of memory is the art of attention.” ~Samuel Johnson

The Good Path, Mixed Media

Bridgette has a few links I think you'll want to check out below, including the amanno site where you can buy her handmade journals!

website portfolio: http://www.guerzonmills.com
art blog: http://www.bgmartjournal.blogspot.com
journals: http://www.amanobooks.com

Enjoy your explorations!  Thanks so much to Bridgette for agreeing to be part of this feature!

A Walk Through The Universe: The Fleeting Moment, The Backward Glance, Week 2

The second week of November and I have a thermometer that reads 73 degrees outside...hard to believe I'm here in South Dakota!  I have had a delightful week corresponding with an artist whose work speaks so eloquently to these ideas we are pondering, "the fleeting moment, the backwards glance".  


I can't quite recall exactly how I found Kira Sheker and her Etsy shop, Labyrinthine Nature, but once I did I knew that she was exactly the person I was seeking! Her photographs, which I saw first, had an ethereal quality that captured moments not-so-fleeting at all.  Then I realized many of her photographs were made with a pinhole camera and I was doubly charmed.  Of course! The pinhole camera....the perfect way to slow down time and capture a reality that eludes us in our race through the day. I've chosen just a few pinhole images from her website, which can be found here, but she is also making beautiful photographs, layered and ethereal, that are not pinhole. At her website and shop you can find her charming illustrations as well...what a creative, inquisitive soul! And, I also encourage you to take a look at her beautiful blog here. Kira has given us quite an insight into her creative process and what fuels her ideas about life and making art. I'll turn it over to her, beginning with her favorite quotes!


"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." - Sylvia Plath

From Jane Eyre, a quote that pulled me out of a slump:
"Only one thing I know; you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection - one thing I can comprehend: you intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane. it seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would, in a few years, have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure."

"Do you really think it's wise to try to push the sun back down before it rises?" - from one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite musicians - Emily Haines (Listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgSYwqjlAsU -it's reallllly good!) 

I love to tell a story, and I’m always keen to create a narrative through my artwork, but sometimes I do it in the way of a type of abstract magical realism.  When I went to college, I actually studied literature and had fallen in love with magical realism, but I soon realized that it had always been a part of my own endeavors to create.  In doing this, at least with regard to my photography, I like to use long exposure times, layered images, and pinhole photography. I'm very much interested in dreams, symbolism and the life in-between, what cannot be seen to the naked eye. I'm also keen on representing buried memories that are formless, but hound us in our conceptualization of the world.

Although I am a great fan overall of photography, it's the blurred and abstract images that enchant me, the distorted view of the pinhole, the magical world of layers, the surrealism of double exposures, and the altered view of the plastic lens that intrigue me most.  But out of all these wonderful possibilities, my heart continued back to one over and over, and that was the image of the pinhole. When I first set eyes on pinhole images, my heart raced and fluttered and I felt strangely as if I’d come home. As with all pinhole images, it takes the ordinary mundane existence and transforms it into the extraordinary, breaking established rules and allowing for a different perspective.  Movements that are so subtle we cannot capture them with a “normal” camera or even with our own eyes, but they are captured with a long exposure on a simple lens-less camera.  One of the joys of pinhole photography for me is the process, which takes patience, something I’m usually lacking. 

With regard to pinhole, mostly, it is the movement I'm drawn to, the dreamy, softly distorted portrait of something as mundane as a woman having breakfast.  Is she really there, or is she a remnant of a memory, an entity that no longer breathes?  Perhaps this is reality captured on film and our own eyes trick us into believing something else, a mirage of what is actual truth. 

In these blurred images, the mundane becomes bizarre, strange, and uncanny – things by which I am forever fascinated and to which I am constantly drawn. By having neither lens nor light meter, the pinhole has nothing separating “reality” to film.  The lack of a viewfinder and lack of regularity, especially with regard to light, gives the photographer an element of surprise when the film is developed, something that I find highly exciting.  The pinhole image is almost never a “straight” shot; it is satisfyingly unpredictable and allows collaboration between the photographer and film, nothing else. 

 

As for inspiration, I can pretty much find it anywhere, whether it be a snippet of an overheard conversation or a phrase in a song. In photography, I've been influenced by, or at least found inspiration in, Diana Bloomfield, Francesca Woodman, Sarah Moon and Ellen Rogers. Other artists I've been influenced by are Edward Gorey, Michael Sowa and Frida Kahlo. But mostly, I'm in awe of those who are diversified in their works or are self-taught. It gives me great incentive to venture forth and do what I want to do myself and not worry about whether it's the "right thing" or not.



A lot to think about here and I know you'll want to follow those links to find out more about Kira, so here's a recap!
Etsy shop

blog

website

Thanks so much for being here and I hope you're enjoying your walk through the universe!