It’s been about a year since switching gears to my artistic practice. The electrography collection literally came to me via psychic insight and I was able to follow that insight at the time. I was in college at the time, and deep into my research interests when the idea came to me and with the help of my father – he was able to help build the device I needed to pursue the project. My professors encouraged me to build a legacy of images surrounding this style of photographic art. I have been deeply terrified of following other ideas due to them not having any sort of structure to measure success or to define the project to be successful. Through the years of exhibiting my electrography collection I’ve been teaching myself how to measure the success of this project so I can embark on other projects and ideas that are similar – which is why and how I devised the research framework. I had realized my electrography collection came from my research interests and once I defined a framework for that, my other ideas for projects developed nicely.
This past year I have done an enormous amount of soul searching and figuring out what and how I would conduct my artistic practice. I have 8 research interests that are propagating that I see unfolding over the next 5-10 years. I have felt very blessed that my first steps into the art world professionally have been met with success, but it is also terrifying to me to try to follow and continue these steps. Of the 8 research interests, only a few have stuck with me as something to pursue and that are feasible to pursue in the moment.
One of the things that was brought to my attention is that much of the opportunities that I pursued were in order to help other organizations continue to run. Which is fine and all – perhaps for an entry level artist – however, I feel at this stage of my career there should be less of that and more things carried out and organized on my own. So this means having a full body of work ready to be displayed when submitting to calls for exhibition, learning how to apply for grants and securing funding for larger scale projects, collaborating with larger institutions and universities to carry out work that is beneficial to the people involved, among other things. When realizing that I have the skills to conduct these projects essentially on my own outside of the established boundaries of art, it is quite freeing. I do not need that residency or development course to carry out a project – utilizing the resources at hand, I can carry out these projects myself.
The universe has a funny way of working… I have been working on this new artwork series within the last month and just the last couple of days an opportunity came through within my network for me to go back to my artistic home – Italy – to potentially work with a textile manufacturer in a collaborative project. I had been feeling a pull to work on my research interest of weaving and textile arts and this synchronicity has sort of confirmed it for me. I have put several ideas out into the universe and seems to me that this one will lead somewhere. Which leads me to introduce the project…
MagKnotic! A series of textile arts that are inspired by magnetic fields visualized with ferrofluid and light. This project is about the theory that weaving and textile arts, specifically Celtic – as well as others, contain meanings embedded within the knots, forming a language. For example, a comparison between an image of the earth’s magnetic field and the Celtic tree of life depicting the exploding/imploding energy. An implosion is simply the opposite of an explosion. In an explosion, matter and energy fly outward, but in an implosion, matter and energy collapse inward. So in short, implosions are caused by having a greater pressure on the outside of an object than on the inside. For the purpose of this project, it will focus on the Celtic knotting methods and it’s correlation to magnetism. However, this project can extend to other cultures such as South America and as far as East Asia.