Future Direction

Throughout the quarter I have been blogging about other artists’ work and have not yet written about my own. For the last blog of the quarter I wanted to talk about what I have been working on and reflect on my future direction. I have been making small collages based on a fear that I have and a corresponding fantasy that is like the opposite of that fear. My plan with creating the collage was to create a composition, then scan the composition, make a negative on transparency, then print in the darkroom. However, after working with the collages I’m tending to favor the collage over the darkroom print. I have posted one of my collages here on the blog; yet, you really cannot get the feel of the collage texture through the scanner. This texture is what is veering me towards working only with the collage and not in the darkroom at all. I’ve also been looking at Patrick Woodroffe’s work, who I have admired since a young girl, and thinking about his technique. He does drawings and paintings of mythical characters and places them in a setting so that he can photograph them. I was thinking of doing something similar. I have also posted a picture of Woodroffe’s work featuring his “Elephas”, a snail-elephant animal. The elephas is an illustration; however, the flowers are real flowers. I would love to incorporate both photographs and illustrations into an environment and take photographs like this. I would even like to try making a fictional setting and then placing a real object into the setting to photograph. Still, when would it stop being photography and start being illustration? How much photography would have to be incorporated for the work to be considered photography?