Flower Documentaries
These prints are made with a collagraph plate of sintra, which is a fairly soft, thin plastic that sign-makers use. As I worked with it, layered different materials against it, and rolled and scraped ink on it, it got a little dinged up and marked with lines from tools and netting and stencils that I used. The prints that I made started to remind me of old film footage on celluloid, with all the stray specks and hairs and random scratches that appear for hundredths of a second. They keep appearing, even after the countdown is over and the movie has started, but you don't notice so much when there is action on the screen. I think those marks give old movies a texture that feels like an accurate translation of life--unintentional, chaotic, sometimes distracting, completely beside the point, but still part of the experience.
That visual noise is useful in creating still prints that have a feeling of spontaneity and unpredictability. For me, it also generates in my head an ambient sound, a crackle or sputter or a kind of hoary hiss like the first moments before the song starts on a vinyl record while the needle revolves in the empty groove. It is visually and aurally anticipatory of some imminent entertainment. What if it is the universe, about to cohere some translatable sound from the undiscerning static of dark matter? What a show stopper that would be.