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lookingglass
Through the "Looking Glass," readers are invited to dig deeper into our issues as contributors share reflections on their work. Specifically, "Looking Glass" provides a sort of parlor where authors and artists reveal the genesis of their pieces, as well as provide meta-discursive insight into their textual and visual creative works. Issue 20 Reflections
Read on for reflections by select authors and artists
on the genesis and craft of their pieces in Glassworks and then read the full issue online! |
ROGER CAMP
"BLUE BUCKETS ALONG THE NILE" | "GIRL IN SWIMMING POOL" | "LAMP AND SHUTTER COPTIC CAIRO"
The point of view of these three photographs are significantly different from each other, one at eye level, one looking skyward and one looking down from a fifth story balcony. Together they reflect my view that images are discoverable everywhere as long as we are present and paying attention.
I like the idea that photographs can provide more information than they contain on a literal level. For example, if you examine “The Blue Buckets,” you will notice that the handle of the rake is made from a tree branch. This would tell you the photo was likely taken in a developing country. This collection of tools might also provoke one into thinking about the person or persons who uses them. What they look like. What their life is like even though they are not present.
For me it’s important that an image have a narrative, something mysterious occurring outside the frame.
I like the idea that photographs can provide more information than they contain on a literal level. For example, if you examine “The Blue Buckets,” you will notice that the handle of the rake is made from a tree branch. This would tell you the photo was likely taken in a developing country. This collection of tools might also provoke one into thinking about the person or persons who uses them. What they look like. What their life is like even though they are not present.
For me it’s important that an image have a narrative, something mysterious occurring outside the frame.
ANNA SANDY-ELROD
"WHILE OUT OF MY COUNTRY'S REACH"
“While Out of My Country’s Reach” is a poem formed from my experience of hearing about another in a series of mass shootings that occurred in American Walmarts late last summer, while I was traveling in Spain. It explores the juxtaposition between how secure and nourished I felt, how far from the possibility of a mass shooting, and learning that yet another one had happened in my home. It explores how fragile the human body is, how it can be torn apart as easily as the skin of a fruit. The emotional core of the poem, I think, is the way that such events make one afraid to exist in the day-to-day when tragedies keep striking, how it drove home the fear that my own family, my husband who was back in America at the time, any children I might have, could be ripped out of my hands while doing something as mundane as buying groceries, and how it made me want to stay where I was and pretend that everything would always be as safe and lovely as it was on that beach in Alicante, though I knew that I would soon be returning to my real world. It ends with a move toward the physical pain of burning sand on skin as a way to escape the emotional conflict. I hope that it isn’t a hopeless poem, but rather one that reckons with our American complicity and the knowledge that we don’t have to allow the continuation of mass shootings.
guilherme bergamini
"photogram 01" | "photogram 04"
The series "Photogram" is composed of leaves collected from the vegetation of the Cerrado Biome, delimited in a space of four hectares located in the municipality of Sete Lagoas, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The iconic shape of the leaves of this biome, fixed on paper, are like fingerprints, fragments of a plant identity. Occupying 24% of the national territory, the Cerrado Biome is the second largest Brazilian vegetable Amazon, the world's richest tropical savannah in biodiversity. Comprising three of the largest hydrographic basins in South America, it concentrates no less than a third of the national biodiversity and 5% of the world's flora and fauna.*
Photogram Technique
Fotograma is a technique of image production without the use of camera obscura and having as a medium the light for the formation of the image. Simply place an object on photosensitive media and expose to light. After the chemical processing has a negative image of the contour of the objects used. A pioneer in photographic development, William Henry Fox Talbot, produced frames before even the "invention" of this technique.
Anna Atkins, the British botanist, was the first person to realize the potential of photography in scientific works, using the cyanotype process for the production of her frames, producing the first picture book in history with photographic images in 1843, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
To see the complete series, please visit: http://guilhermebergamini.com/fotograma/
*Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply — Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)
Photogram Technique
Fotograma is a technique of image production without the use of camera obscura and having as a medium the light for the formation of the image. Simply place an object on photosensitive media and expose to light. After the chemical processing has a negative image of the contour of the objects used. A pioneer in photographic development, William Henry Fox Talbot, produced frames before even the "invention" of this technique.
Anna Atkins, the British botanist, was the first person to realize the potential of photography in scientific works, using the cyanotype process for the production of her frames, producing the first picture book in history with photographic images in 1843, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
To see the complete series, please visit: http://guilhermebergamini.com/fotograma/
*Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply — Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)
PATRICE BOYER CLAEYS
"THE VISIT"
This poem narrates a visit by an elderly mother with her grown daughter. As is sometimes the case with slowly burning emotional encounters, the daughter’s voice attempts a plain, factual tone as a way to minimize her fraught feelings. She reports details of what the two do each day: knit, talk, eat, shop, go to the theater—all mundane things, but each one laced with a sense of foreboding. The spring day is cold, the knitting is fumbled, the food doesn’t satisfy, the play is about murder.
Throughout these scenes there is a disconnect between mother and daughter, made clearer by the dialog that refreshes old hurts and by the daughter’s occasional internal observations: “my moxie a badge of belonging,” “a soft thought I could never share.” By layering daily events and alternating between the flat tone and the subtext of misunderstanding and suppressed feelings, the poem moves from the visit itself to the leave-taking at the airport. In the last three stanzas we see the mother, not as the force of power from the daughter’s childhood, but as a weakened woman relying on the care of others. It is the mother who breaks the tension by crying at the parting and then apologizing quickly out of embarrassment. But this brief display of feeling lets the daughter experience the mother’s vulnerability, the tenderness made tangible by her soft hair.
You’ll notice I’ve written about this poem in the third person. That’s because it still moves me. One point that continues to astonish is that not one element of this poem is invented. Every last detail came from actual events of my mother’s visit, now some ten years ago. It is rare, and quite wonderful, when a poem arrives fully formed as you write it on the page. Is life always that rich with metaphor, a gift always waiting, asking only that we be open and present enough to receive it?
Throughout these scenes there is a disconnect between mother and daughter, made clearer by the dialog that refreshes old hurts and by the daughter’s occasional internal observations: “my moxie a badge of belonging,” “a soft thought I could never share.” By layering daily events and alternating between the flat tone and the subtext of misunderstanding and suppressed feelings, the poem moves from the visit itself to the leave-taking at the airport. In the last three stanzas we see the mother, not as the force of power from the daughter’s childhood, but as a weakened woman relying on the care of others. It is the mother who breaks the tension by crying at the parting and then apologizing quickly out of embarrassment. But this brief display of feeling lets the daughter experience the mother’s vulnerability, the tenderness made tangible by her soft hair.
You’ll notice I’ve written about this poem in the third person. That’s because it still moves me. One point that continues to astonish is that not one element of this poem is invented. Every last detail came from actual events of my mother’s visit, now some ten years ago. It is rare, and quite wonderful, when a poem arrives fully formed as you write it on the page. Is life always that rich with metaphor, a gift always waiting, asking only that we be open and present enough to receive it?
K. Johnson Bowles
"veronica's cloths" [COLLECTION]
INCLUDING: "Eyes Swollen Shut" | "safe unsafe deception" | "suicide Watch"
While this body of work is not about a particular religious belief or cannon, the series title takes its name from the St. Veronica legend. It is said Veronica wiped Christ’s face with her veil on his journey carrying the cross. The image of his face miraculously left an impression on the cloth. The series Veronica’s Cloths explores the residual nature of physical and emotional trauma in a contemporary context of women’s experience. The works represent flashes in the mind’s eye and suggest an untold drama of violation, loss, grief, pain, and shame. Each work is a collage using vintage handkerchiefs, photographs, and other materials in a manner that is purposefully “grandmotherly” and “nanacore.” Inspiration includes Mexican retablos, religious shrines, Baroque art, 17th Century Dutch still life paintings, Voudou, and African power figures (nkisi) of Kongo tradition.
The blurry color-saturated images of flowers symbolize what cannot be understood because the experience is too close. It expresses a sense of yearning to see what is beautiful but unattainable or no longer exists. It references the experience of closing one’s eyes and only seeing shapes and colors but nothing is concrete and three-dimensional. These are images focused on searching and “looking” for truth and healing amidst profound difficulty and dealing with what is “out of sight.”
The images of hands are photographs of details from paintings displayed in museums. These details taken out of context suggest clues to a more complex narrative drama and beg the question, “what happened?” Each image conveys the fallibility of memory and the incompleteness or impossibility of total recall. The gestures represented convey the continuum of responses to trauma and their complexities such as prayer, anger, depression, fear, guilt, or shame.
The blurry color-saturated images of flowers symbolize what cannot be understood because the experience is too close. It expresses a sense of yearning to see what is beautiful but unattainable or no longer exists. It references the experience of closing one’s eyes and only seeing shapes and colors but nothing is concrete and three-dimensional. These are images focused on searching and “looking” for truth and healing amidst profound difficulty and dealing with what is “out of sight.”
The images of hands are photographs of details from paintings displayed in museums. These details taken out of context suggest clues to a more complex narrative drama and beg the question, “what happened?” Each image conveys the fallibility of memory and the incompleteness or impossibility of total recall. The gestures represented convey the continuum of responses to trauma and their complexities such as prayer, anger, depression, fear, guilt, or shame.
