Material and image come together to create and reflect experience in time. Intrigued by the surfaces and actions associated with the stitch, I draw attention to that which suggests our own emotional and physical falling apart through the photographic. The images reveal traces of use: folds, breaks, stains and tears, pins and needles accumulated; fabric heavily marked, raveled into itself, viscous and laden with resin; thread undone and knotted by the hand’s movement.
The object, its form and its marked surface, exposes its associations with the body while the still image, tied up with all of its history, easily draws relationships to experience, memory and emotion. It allows each object to stand void of its context, highlighting the moments where surface and experience meet. It can augment and punctuate the intricacies of actions taken against it, resulting in a photographic surface that rests on the edge of beauty and ugliness, healing and neglect. Further still, the moving image allows me to explore material and action more directly, to communicate a sense of immediacy in each.
Barthes wrote that "A photograph's punctum is that accident [of photographic detail] which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me), ...for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole---and also a caste of the dice." It is that very sting and prick that propels me toward investigations of the tenuous relationship between hand and surface, object and image.
© 2005-2009 Jennifer Brandon