Still Life, 2000
I think there is a furious beauty;
It may look like the blue vein of lily strangling sky,
It has, anyway, dark unctuous wings torn from a bird,
A ventriloquist grin,
It is very angry with its Mother.
This work references the first female photographer, Anna Atkins, who made cyanotypes of botanical studies. It is also a response to Kant’s hierarchical table of the (masculine) Sublime vs. the (feminine and diminutive) Beautiful. 50 Photograms of plastic flowers and a wall of live roots. Only two of the prints have been fixed by chemistry. Each image is a one-of-a-kind “sun print”. Installed incrementally over a one-week period (exposed to sunlight) the unfixed images fade. All leave a metallic trace mark.
Unfixed photograms on Printing-Out-Paper, 11x14", live roots, text etched on glass, 2 images framed and fixed.