In an effort to be a bit more transparent about the processes that makeup my artistic practice, I wanted to delve into talking about brainstorming, how I conceptualize projects and what my workflow looks like early in a project. This process definitely varies a bit for me as I experiment with various media and incorporate new research into my work but I love hearing about how others work and wanted to share a bit about how I do as well.

Typically I work best on multiple projects at the same time (not because I have an excess of time but because then I can bend my work into my schedule more fluidly) and currently, I have a few projects in the works – a book (coming March 2021, I cannot wait to share the details!), some new/ongoing long term photographic work, mixed media work that I’m still trying to translate into a meaningful component of my practice and because I have a hard time focusing/waiting for film to come back a small zine of snippets from my archives tentatively titled Jupiter & Her Moons.

I usually begin my work with several general themes in mind. Since most of my work is diaristic/self documentary in nature these themes often have todo with my daily life and issues that intersect that experience. From there, I test and explore my ideas both written and visually to get a feel for the film, materials, and output types I would like to work with. I start to ask questions about the information, emotion, visual intersection of ideas, aesthetics, getting into more detail as the project progresses. I try to answer these questions both visually and in written form, I think that this helps me to flesh out my ideas and create images that more strongly reflect what I am trying to convey. I keep a sketchbook with drawings, photographs (mostly test images from my phone), and words that I find interesting or help inform what I am thinking. I am constantly referring back to these ideas throughout the course of a project so that I can use where my thoughts have “been” to help facilitate where they are “going”.

Lately, I’ve been doing some reading on particle physics (my guilty pleasure) and my three year old has become really interested in the books. Long story short we started learning about space together and she is just fascinated by moons. Some more research and I fell back in love with many of the themes that interested me before I had babies – cosmology, ecology, interaction. The past several months have seen me feeling a variety of ways about my creative practice – everything from apathetic and “never making work again” to overjoyed and feeling like I’m finally making the work I’ve wanted to for years and most days lately seem to be leaning towards the apathetic end , I’m finding it extra important to delve into work that I love and feels meaningful to me.

Anyway, back to it. I love to fiddle within work for periods of time letting the work grow and expand on its own, retracting images, creating new ones, re-sequencing – its really important to me that the work has the ability to grow organically and experience itself in a variety of ways before I push it too far. To this end I usually find the earliest parts of my projects taking significantly longer than the later stages, which can sometimes feel boggy or frustrating but I am always glad for looking back. This is especially true for my photographic work, I oftentimes find that my near constant play with the images allows for them to grow many times over before I feel a project is complete and its one of the things I love most about my images looking back. Although that amount of growth isn’t probably apparent to the viewer it makes me love each image that much more. The past few months have seen my practice slow down a bit as I navigated a move but I’m excited to jump back into it and see what this season holds.

How has the last several months seen your practice change?

Thanks for reading!