Lumen Notebook: No Title Required, 2019
Datz Museum Artist Residency in South Korea
At Datz Museum of Art, I asked the all-women-team there who run the residency, museum and press to select books by or featuring their heroines. I made photograms with the old darkroom papers they had on hand and the books they brought me. Each image was titled with the book (or one of the books) that made the photogram. The 10 images in this series were made with the light of the sun in July on the residency grounds, a bucolic mountainside.
These photographs are sun-prints made with traditional black & white darkroom papers. “Lumen Notebook” is rooted in the question, "What is a photograph?" This work makes a practice of marking time in and with nature. The temporal, unfixed prints are scanned, making use of older analog and newer digital photographic processes together.
No Title Required was printed and exhibited at Datz Museum in South Korea as a scroll, in conjunction with their 10th anniversary, October-November, 2019.
The excerpt below is from the book, “View With a Grain of Sand,” selected for the project by Datz Museum founder, Sangyon Joo:
No Title Required
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
And won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.[…]
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is not other than itself, no one else’s but it’s own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
View With a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska
Many of the papers used for this project were old photo papers from the black and white darkroom at the Datz Museum Studios. The black and white silver gelatin photo papers sourced for this project are:
Elieid/Ilford MGRC deluxe IV, Ilfobrom Gallerie FB 1G 35k, MG FB IV Gloss MG TK, Adorama FB, Adorama Gloss RC, Ilfobrom Gallerie 1k FB, Elieid Elisped Matt 3.2M, Forte Elegance poly warmtone, Ilford cool tone, Ilford warmtone, MG, IV deluxe pearl RC, Ilfospeed deluxe gloss, Hanhnemuhle fine art 300, Ilford MG FB Classic
Titles/Images:
Sangyon - Gravity and Grace
Juyoung - A Friend is a Soul in 5 Bodies
Young Hea - Diary
Jay - Student A
MinYoung - Stealing Away Song
Songa - Tastes Like Literature
MinJung - Eyes I do Have
Hyemi - The Word of Love
Sorang - My Mother’s Story
Jinhee - Everything of Women’s Life