Ana Mendieta’s Tree of Life documentation from her Earth Body series is the first image glued into the inside cover of my last sketchbook. I constantly revisit this image that made its own deep impression into my understanding of visual communication. The silhouette of her body in the earth is literally, her physical presence in the work. I want to know what makes a work, undoubtedly, something a woman made. I want my presence as a woman in my work. I want to know precisely about the qualities that can define a piece of graphic design as ‘feminine.’ Is it some quality I possess as a woman, such as my sensitivity? If so, then I want to understand how to expand upon that sensitivity through form. A rug made of rags, made by a woman’s hands, compels me. I envy the richness in this fabric— how can I make my work do the same? Is it an aesthetic sensibility? I want to translate that sensibility into materials then. Can I exploit or embrace tropes of femininity? I want to understand the notion of how gender can translate into an aesthetic representation, and how much that can be heightened and understood by others. I want to mirror the intimacy of the ways that women have and continue to communicate their experience in my work. If I am defining my presence as a woman in my work, a presence so historically defined in art by being looked at, I want to use that opportunity to communicate, to say something about what it means to observe and be observed.
Recording and collecting what I look at is an important part of my process. I collect compulsively to articulate a recurring visual resonance. I collect to make a frame, to define what kinds of evocation I want to see in my work. In the book Album, Hannah Höch’s collection of diverse images, from popular magazines to scientific periodicals, prompt me to question the criteria for this collection. Did she imagine the album as a stand alone piece? Were these materials accrued for use in her collages and photomontages? What purpose does collecting found images serve? How does our perception of images change when they are reordered and re-represented? I think it is possible to define a personal atmosphere by using other people’s images. Teenagers have always had this uncanny ability; their bedroom walls wallpapered with magazine cutouts and movie posters; a room as a self-contained and constructed atmospheric environment. I respond to images in this way too— to their immediacy and physical presence, to what feelings and unseen actions are lurking in them, in the details of subtle gestures. While images can function as words, conversely, Vladimir Nabokov used words as a way to collect images in his process. In an interview in 1964, when asked to share an excerpt of his work in progress, he refused, but did offer the interviewer a glimpse into his collection of found phrases when writing the novel Pale Fire. The interviewer asks, “what inspires you to record and collect such disconnected impressions and quotations?” Nabokov replied, “All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it. When I remember afterwards the force that made me jot down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure.” If collections of photographs and words can create a physical or virtual environment, how do tangible objects manipulate meaning? Objects are not mute. The creation of meaning through recombined parts is not limited to images. The physicality of objects conveys cultural status, aesthetics and personal values the same way that images do. Objects evoke humor and idiosyncrasy. Objects can be embedded with symbolism and evocation through their arrangement. Vernacular objects have much to say about social exchanges. I want to know what a decorative object’s true function is. What does it mean to feel attraction to an object that is purely aesthetic? The Collections of Barbara Bloom, an exhibition catalogue that mimics an auction catalogue produces a strange doubled effect of aesthetic attraction and skepticism. In a work titled “Film stills of a couple with books from Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman is a Woman, Bloom looks to Godard’s use of books to describe characters and their relationships, concluding that, “If you cannot judge a book by its cover, you can at least draw some conclusions about the person holding it.” Everyday objects can behave as props. Props interest me, because once they’ve lost their value as functional objects, their use is to imply and suggest. I can only echo this third person statement on Innuendo, from The Collections of Barbara Bloom: “Directness was obviously not her forté. Obtuseness was more her style…Another good example is the way we strive to portray a life through the collection of objects someone has left behind, as if in the oddly shaped interstices between the chair and the mirror, the book and the tea cup, a shadow of a presence will take form as a longed-for face, a missed turn of phrase, a recognizable absence.”