Afterlives
2017-2020
My mother once picked a bouquet of wildflowers and gave it to me, held together with a piece of grass tied around the stems. I saved the bouquet, brought it home with me, and wondered how I could preserve her gesture. Afterlives is a series of images that explores the ways that a gesture can be preserved, remembered, and altered in the course of remembering and being archived. I use several different imaging techniques (cyanotype, scanning, risograph printing, inkjet printing, and photography) to investigate the ways that the object can be re-visualized based on the method of looking or saving.
Most of the images are photographs of an assemblage: from bottom to top, a cyanotype of the bouquet, an inkjet print on mylar, and plant detritus left behind from the bouquet itself. I also include a scan of the physical bouquet and a scan of a risograph print of the bouquet. The print on mylar (the middle layer of the assemblage) is a print of this risograph scan. While documenting the assemblage, I noticed how the reflections in the mylar caused the entire object to morph, erasing the possibility of existing as one permanent image. In addition, the seeds, berries, leaves, and pollen shed by the bouquet refused to remain in one place, shifting across the surface of the mylar with every movement in the air around them.
Although the bouquet no longer exists, and the moment of giving me the bouquet remains in the past, the care in the gesture has been archived in some way through the transient visual beauty of the object – its silhouette, its changing shapes, its fallen seeds and leaves, and even a living caterpillar who clung onto a stem and secretly traveled home with me. Hypothetically, archiving something means keeping it in its original state for as long as possible. But I am struck by how this object remains volatile, continuing to evolve after being isolated from its original context and preserved.