the importance of analogue
I am constantly drawn to notions of slowness in making (although actually I think I am quite an impatient maker!) As a human being, I crave slow. As a maker, slow helps ideas emerge. As a teacher, an awareness of the benefits of slow is important. All of this slowness is, perhaps, a soothing antidote to the fast pace of life around us. We are all in a constant race, and quite simply, it is exhausting. I wrote a poem in my writing group recently about feeling like sand running through a timer. How my pace is sometimes dictated by others. I am not even in full control of it. This fast thing is all around us… it takes so much effort to ignore it or even try to counteract it.
I watch the pace of life continue to speed up, and I am trying to find ways to be pro-active in slowing down. Sometimes that comes from slow making.
I find that I want to be part of social media and the fast-paced digital world, but the barrage of images, the busyness, the noise that emanates from that, is deafening sometimes. I watch other people producing, commodifying, publishing, circulating images on this never-ending, speeding-up, treadmill. I think people must be exhausted from monitoring, creating, editing and sharing these images. It creates visual saturation, and I sometimes feel as though I am being suffocated with those constantly changing, fast-paced, fleeting, visual images. I never have time to look properly. I never have time to REALLY look. Looking takes time. Properly looking is slow stuff.
I am also forever overwhelmed by the increasing number of digital photos that I am accumulating. They are just building up, in a virtual mountain, with a new load being dumped on top after every holiday, every birthday, every beach walk, every moment. I am not entirely sure how to organise and sort them to make them accessible. No, I don’t just mean accessible, I mean more than that. I want my images to be meaningful again.
So I happened upon this idea to give me a chance to breathe again … I have begun to de-digitize my photos. Instead of taking my analogue photos and digitising them, I am taking my digital photos and analogue-ing them (that’s not even a proper word – I don’t think there is a word for ‘undoing’ digitization. No-one thinks there is a need to do this. So there is no word for it.) I am taking all of those fast images and giving them a slow and careful make-over - careful looking, careful composition, careful drawing - using monotype printmaking. It is a process that reminds me so much of the old film approach: of simplicity, of monochrome, of not knowing what will come back when the film has been developed.