In her novel “The Bell Jar”, Sylvia Plath wrote:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.”
When we dare we humans are spider veins, spreading out – branching out — and pushing into new territory.
Last week, I spent a glorious day with photographer/artist Karan Olson, in her studio in Hope, Maine, learning how to create paper sculptures incorporating my photographs. I loved it.
What did I love about it?
There is no template. You make it up.
There are no rules. Do what you want.
Use the materials you want to use.
Create something tactile, something with textures.
Play with glue and scissors and even culinary blow torches, perfect for creme brulee but also for burning edges.
In creating these sculptures (and there will be many more), I am giving myself the opportunity to use my photographs in a completely new way. And therefore to see them in new ways, as well.
This one, for example, feels almost Picasso-esque, and I hadn’t seen the human head before I created the sculpture.
The cover image feels like a sack of sacred memories. Maybe even a little bit Yoko Ono.
The more I branch out and try new things — color instead of b&w, medium format instead of full format, sculpture instead of prints — the more I learn what really interests me. And, perhaps most of all, what it is my work is about.