I've finally begun a new series of work after several weeks of drawing and fun painting- the kind that I don't have any high aspirations for, the kind that I created before I wanted to really say something through my work. Fun painting usually brings me to the next stage because it clears my mind and allows room for new ideas to creep in. It worked for me again.
I recently photographed the layers of wallpaper on another old home that is being renovated near our summer place. This got me thinking again about wallpapers as holders of family memory as well as their historical and social significance which I explored in a previous series of work called Remnants. I've extended my explorations from that series to consider wallpaper as interior landscapes and combined remnants of them (in photo transfer) with exterior landscapes that have connections to my family history. I'm excited about the explorations and I'm still figuring out how to meld the two but I know I'm on to something that makes my bells chime!
3 comments:
What a wonderful connection -- old wallpapers as detritus of family histories/memories! Have you ever read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (late 1800s)-- it's a classic short story in Women's Literature. Good luck on your new series!
I really like this connection. I have done visual memoirs that are collages of peoples lives, events, etc. and found it fascinating. I look forward to seeing how you develop this.
What an interesting idea. There is a lot of history in wallpaper. I used to work at a historical reinactment museum and when restoring the houses they peeled off an average of 20 layers of wallpaper. Each layer they saved a large enough piece to get the pattern, sent it to a factory and saved the design. They had the factory print the paper for the time period represented. Now all the walls are the same as when the original families lived in them and they do tell a story...
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