Polaroid Love

I've been painting!
Yep yep.
It may be an ugly painting, and I may still not yet believe that it's OK to make ugly paintings and that it's all part of the process...but ho hum. It's a painting.
Better than airwaves full of my moans at not having done one.

I love how it's real. I can hold it, touch it, put my hands in the not-yet-dry paint and smoosh it all around. It causes mess and I don't care. Well, I do, I care very much that the pretty goddess I drew last night is now looking more like a freaky vampire girl with orange eyes, but that's not my point.

What was my point? Oh yes. Polaroid love!!

With my photography, I tend to pretty much always work digitally. The only time I work with film is when I'm experimenting with toy and vintage cameras. Fun, but expensive, and the processing chemicals wafting around the bathroom make me strangely neurotic. And the gelatin is unethical, but that's a whole other post.
What I love about polaroids is how instant they are. I don't have to wait until I can afford to send a roll of 120 off to be developed (rare), and I don't have to go through the process of converting the bathroom to a darkroom (and back again - that's the worst part). I click, expose and out it pops! I love watching the emulsion drying and seeing the image appear. It's like 'normal' film photography and darkroom work, especially designed for impatient people.

I have a set of images that I produced using a dodgy camera, that didn't expose properly. It shot the polaroids out, but with no real image formed in the emulsion...this meant that each time I made a photograph, I had a piece of film with wet emulsion for me to do what I wanted with.

And this is what I did. These are a few of the photos from the series, entitled "And All This Trapped In A Body".

"This girl has, as I have said, the qualities of greatness:

passion and vision, a wild ambition, a powerful social awareness,

an overpowering thirst for learning and development,

an impassioned love of life, a great gift of expression.

And all this trapped in a body."

Kim Chernin, on Ellen West (1981:171) 

I hung the fresh polaroids to drip some of the emulsion, and manipulated some of it by hand/finger nail. I wanted to form shapes that express the female form, in an abstract non-perfect way. The work has been described as "X-rays of the soul" and I like that. Also "an effigy", "the orange..disturbed by the borders closing in...not so peaceful". My husband said "I see the being push hard from it's social snare, the representation of the species evident and oppressive" - it's interesting to me to hear about what others see in my work. It can add completely new dimensions, or even suggest something I hadn't even considered myself.

It's important to share for this reason. Art requires a audience to bring it to life.