Freshly SHREDDED Flowers
I have been obsessively working with instant film since 2016. I began using expired polaroid to photograph flowers when a dear family member had a hospital stay after a traumatic brain injury. For more information about this origin story see: Flowers for M.
One visual aspect of these pictures that struck me was that the expired chemistry inside the film yielded erratic and amorphous formations that reminded me of fluids in the brain. Moving on from the original, unmanipulated Polaroids, I have created this series of paper-shredded flowers. I make two initial images, put the images into a paper shredder, and then “heal” the two flower captures together with tape. I did this without too much thought, but in hindsight it reminds me of the duality of creation and destruction that an artist undergoes on a regular basis. We often must fail or ruin a great deal of images in order to get to the best work. Even as I shred the image, the jagged cuts create new marks in time. The serrated edges also appear like stitching, joining two moments together.
When the human body is injured, a mark is created as a scar, a record in time. As we create new things each day our bodies are slowly deteriorating. Like a body, the chemical picture can only last so long. As soon as the physical image is created, technically it begins its decline. Polaroid images are created when rollers inside the camera simultaneously spit out the image and also squeeze the chemistry into the development space so that the latent image may come into being. When I shred the Polaroid I am using the same parallel motion that created the image to cut it into parallel pieces. Another aspect of this work is the compression of multiple moments into singular photo-objects. I am compounding disjointed memories into one where the result is a unique piece that holds two moments together. I am choosing to show these as small scale originals (Polaroids were designed to fit neatly in the hand) next to large prints (recto and verso) made from high-resolution scans. The large prints show the jagged cuts from the paper shredder, the clear tape fragments and my fingerprints as I “heal” the flowers together into a new composition, a new moment. The print enlargements are akin to delving deeper into a trauma (like exposure therapy) where you can see changes and healing more clearly. Also, by digitizing the originals I give them new life, theoretically infinite as long as the digital files are maintained.
