The Lights at the End of the Tunnel

Winters are getting harder and harder. I quite like the way cold feels on my skin, and I like the aesthetics of grey skies and wet ground and stripped back branches. But...

But.

The cold is getting more painful each year, and harder to endure. Even harder to deal with is the lack of motivation. Everything is too hard - cooking, photography, creativity, you name it, I don't have the energy or the endurance to do it. Hell, I can't even keep my mood up.

The problem with living in the moment is that the moment is your experience of the world. It's all very well to tell myself that come spring, this lethargy and disgust will pass, and I'll have the will and the motivation to photograph, and to make something. At the moment, I feel blank and empty, a talentless nothing trudging through life. I can't even see in photographs, when my vision is taken up by pain, and the twitching in my fingers and toes to make an image is supplanted by the burning of outraged nerves.

It's not good.

So I pushed myself out, with camera and tripod and crutches, and went to make some pictures. Oddly enough, even intending to work out my angst in some suitably angsty and nihilistic photos, they still came out strangely serene. Ominous, yes, but the serenity is definitely there. I wonder what that says about me?

One thing I know; it's given me some ideas. I think my fingers are twitching. I just hope the cold holds up long enough for me to make the most of it.

Pain, In Progress

Yes, I'm still here. Been doing a few new things - learning to sew, so I can indulge my fondness for Victorian-era clothing, and starting to learn to do Chinese/Japanese brush painting (very, very badly - I can barely do a recognisable straight line). I've also discovered that making sourdough bread makes me feel calmer, happier, and more creative. Odd, yes?

But most of the reason I've been so quiet is a mix of stress and pain. Work has been remarkably stressful, and is only now starting to return to a live-able level of stress, and the cold has made the pain in my feet very difficult to deal with. It's hard to realise, even when you're living it, just how much pain drains you, and makes it next to impossible to be creative. When work is draining you past your endurance levels, and pain takes them even lower, life becomes a rather depressing trudge.

I had hoped that Spring warmth would improve things a bit - at least take the cold out of my joints, and let me walk a bit more. But as anyone in Sydney would know, the weather has perversely turned cold, damp, and rainy; just the weather that makes the arthritis worst. Ouch.

So I'm currently typing from bed; the warmest, flattest place available. Occasionally I venture out to do things that can't be accomplished from under a doona, then head back again when my feet start to complain too much.

Since I haven't any shiny new completed projects to share, I thought I might tell you about some of the things I have in progress, instead. I have several series' that are slowly accumulating images, some of them at least five years old. There's one in particular I'd like to talk about today, since I feel very much like a creaky tree myself - Wooden.


Forking trunk

A tree against the sky possesses the same interest, the same character, the same expression as the figure of a human. - Georges Rouault

I started this series back before I owned a digital camera, so all these images are film. I'd like to continue it with film; it seems to suit the images. There's a few ideas I'm slowly getting my head around with the series. Part of it is me coming to terms with my body - it seems odd to feel uncomfortable with my own physical being, after all. And part of it has to do with the way we see ourselves reflected in nature and the things around us; the way we'll look at the shape of a tree and see ourselveds. And when you get down to it, we are all interconnected, which I think may be an underlying idea in a lot of my work, but more explicitly part of this.


Entwining

I need to re-scan these images - my old scanner was pretty crappy, and a lot of the subtlety of the negatives is lost here. And I'd like some more images to round out the set; I want to see breasts and thighs, ankles and hands, as well as privates. It will have to wait for summer, though, until I can feel a little more anchored in my own body, without being overwhelmed.

So, what do you think? Click here to browse the rest of the series, as it currently is, and make sure to post or email an opinion. Would you like to see more of my in progress projects?


Openings