Review: Work Show Grow Artist Talk

This morning (30th October) I had the opportunity to go to an online artist talk from Work Show Grow (which I would highly recommend!). Each “Artist Talk Salons” has a different theme and today’s was “Family Is Everything”, while not exactly related to my work, I find it interesting to go to these artist talks in case a process or idea pops up and inspires me - you never know - and that’s what happened today. One of the artists that caught my attention was Jessi DiBlasi 1, she spoke a lot of her project “The Long Goodbye” which covered themes of loss, grief, family and connections. 

In particular, she mentioned the home - the kitchen and garden in particular - as a centre point to the family. In a way, I saw her work of a family as an open cycle that invites new families, new memories and new connections in the same house. Similar to the ideas bought up when I went to London for the Trace Elements show, that an object can have many lives and keep the traces of the previous lives. In my case, I’m focusing on the act of writing (both its materiality and its tools) rather than a house, although I feel the same notion can be drawn. Below is a couple of quick mindmaps to get my ideas on paper. Something I didn’t add to the second diagram was the fact that through these activities these objects can be bought to life, It goes from a basic thing/ item to an important object with meaning and life, separating it from “dead”  I won't include photos of her family that she shared with us out of respect however I will be exploring her Lumen Prints which inspired some key thoughts. Below are screenshots from her presentation which I found both exhilarating and aesthetic. To start with making a lumen print takes you back to the beginnings of camera-­less photography in the 1830s when William Henry Fox Talbot made his "photogenic drawings."2

  

I feel I could respond in a lot of different ways to this artist and her work. Although first and foremost the aesthetics caught my eye, I adore the purples, blues and greys that appear in the photosensitive paper. It reminds me of ghosts/fairies and memories (of in this case the flowers). Thinking of this in a contextual way, the dissolving nature of the prints could be linked to the act of handwriting, in the digital world, handwriting notes, letters and such are becoming obsolete in the rise of emails, texts and blogs. Personally, I love handwriting notes, and while I use the laptop for university I keep my notes, lectures etc handwritten. Moreover, even if handwriting is still common the tools have evolved too, for example from feather quills, to fountain pens to standard biros, each producing its own aesthetic and a hierarchy of importance especially in my house (If it is a birthday card/personal letter etc for example, my mum, and I will use a fountain pen to make it more special for the recipient as a biro seems casual and informal). There is also a sense of movement in the way the shadows line the deeper shades. A plant by its nature dies and regrows but these prints, like photographs, make them permanent. In her own words “sometimes my grandpa was in the garden and then he wasn’t”. She couldn't bear to see what was happening to the garden after the house was sold so she took what she could while the garden still had an essence of her grandpa and these prints are a result of that. If I had the chance to do these types of prints I could use letters from my nana, handwritten notes, or flat out gibberish to memorialise the words. Time yellows paper and fades ink and this process could be sped up on photosensitive paper, I’m not sure what the goal would be for these types of prints although it would make a difference from the regular paper/ canvas prints I’m used to. Having said that, if I wanted to keep the images as vibrant as possible it would involve scanning them and printing them on paper or canvas, but at least on the paper prints, I could draw on the top to add more “conversations” and layers. I could also use high-quality paper on gloss/ card to give it a better view artistically. If these prints were left in the sun they could eventually be overexposed and, like a memory, dissolve and become fuzzier, which is very poetic when it comes to the idea of traces and lives lived. There are ways of fixing the prints although according to Jessi this can change the colouration and aesthetic of the print. For example, you could: 

A - scan/photography it to preserve the bright colour 

B - keep it in a black bag, when not on show, so no light can get to it 

C - let it dissolve in the sun and document the process of that 

D - fix it and document the process of a new image. 

Other artists that use Lumen Prints include Joshua White3, Natasha Sanchez4 and Paul Sission5. 

1 https://www.jessiediblasi.com/info 

2 https://www.lomography.com/magazine/321837-how-to-make-lumen-prints 

3 https://www.joshuawhiteart.com/lumen-prints 

4 https://www.natashasanchezcreates.com/lumen-prints/ 

5 http://www.paulsissonphoto.com/lumen-prints/