My practice drastically changed once going into quarantine. I found it very difficult to have any motivation once being home all the time. This is especially because I was mainly photographing people. I was no longer able to photograph people in the same way, and ended up mainly photographing my brother in different metroparks in the Toledo area. This proved to be a challenge as I could no longer shoot on film either, and my dslr stopped working a week into quarantine. This led to most of my photos being phone pics. With these limitations I tried to play off of weird projects I already had been doing. My photos for mom series are literal phone pictures I have always taken for my mom of my brother and I doing weird things in parks. This also drew off of my idea to make eye-spy type pictures of my brother and I hiding in the trees. The last of my film photos are also stuck as edited TIFFs. I was unable to download photoshop as my laptop has no storage, and the files were too big for...
The Coronavirus really came at a time when I was finally progressing towards something substantial in my work within photography and Ceramics. I was finally catching my footing and headed towards a great direction for myself, and then it was all ripped from under my feet. I live in a decently small apartment with Ammity and David, and there really is not a whole lot of space for us three to create a lot of what we were making before everything and turn our living room and bedrooms into a studio. Not only this, but I lost the ability to continue the work in photography that I had been making of my family. My entire family has ended up completely separated from each other with all 4 of us living in completely different cities and states. So, making work on them became completely out of the question quite quickly. I began to only use medium format color photography to document my time here with Ammity and David and develop film in our kitchen sink. I am incredibly grateful that we were able to supply the tools for ourselves to do this, but it still was not the same. However, I did end up drawing a bit for a project in ceramics and I feel like I may have finally reconnected with drawing for the first time since high school. I broke away from the idea of it being realistic and began to use inks, pens, and water and had a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteI had a very very hard time motivating myself especially when everything first came crashing down. I started to lay in bed all day and be sad and would not even eat throughout the day until I was becoming sick and feeling even worse than I began. It took a lot for me to force myself up and a lot of help to continue to stay up and get outside. I stopped making and thinking entirely and it was really scary for me. I thrive from constant movement and things to do, when there was nothing to really do, it shut me down entirely. I saw some peers had more space and a family who was willing to support them were having what seemed like a perfect time during this all, creating hundreds of new things and using all their time effectively. I felt guilty that I had all this time for the first time in my life, yet I could not even get up and out of bed. I hope this summer now that the pressure of being a good art student has been lifted, I will create more things once again. I know we are all going through a life changing time and we must be easy on ourselves, so I am working towards accepting a slowdown in my work.