Findings - Week 01
Where?, La FLORAISON, and early scrapbooking
One of my aim for 2020 is to be more conscious of the time I spend reading/listening/watching new (to me) creative projects. I want to actively make time for other people’s work and creativity in my life. One way of achieving this has been to be more focused with my time but as the year gets busier, I am going to to lose that focus. To combat this, I am going to publicly share a list of works I’ve been enjoying on a weekly basis.
Simon Moreton – Where?
It has taken me a long time to get to part 4 of Where? by Simon Moreton. Between moving house, settling in, and getting carried away with other reading materials, the book has sat unread on my bedside table for too long.
Where? is a beautiful memoir that explores life and death by weaving in and out of history, landscape, and personal stories. Written with prose, comics, photos, found archival text, and drawings, it is an engrossing experience to get into.
Seamlesly meandering through time and space, Simon Moreton, has crafted a memoir that expands from his personal life to the ones of ghosts long gone.
Rooted in Shropshire, it reminds us of the importance of place. Being an expat myself, the importance of a physical space to inhabit and of the story of that place has been central to my life for the past ten years.
Moving houses six times since my arrival in the UK, one of the constant of my life has been the ground under my feet and the histories of those spaces. By carving my path in those histories, I have learned to belong. Simon’s work taps into my need of a solid place in a world that can feel too virtual and ungrounded.
Chikako Watanuki – La FLORAISON
Buying this zine was an impulse. I saw a retweet, I saw the photos, I enquired about postage, I bought the zine. And I do not regret this decision. The peace and quiet that enthralled me on the digital image, held me looking at the paper copy for even longer. There is something simple about the images. Flowers against a blurred background, sometimes only a detail retains any sharpness. But this is not a work about sharpness and pixels. The softness and balance of colours is what keeps me engaged with the work for minutes on end.
For now, La FLORAISON sits on my zine bookshelf, but I know I will return to it time and time again.
Charles Norman Sladen
I have enrolled in a few free online courses since the beginning of the year in an attempt to get me thinking about art again in a more proactive way. One of those courses is all about photography and amongst the miriad of documents to explore, the work of Charles Norman Sladen is mentioned.
A small paragraph in an article, his work held my attention. Taking photos at the beginning of the 20th century, he transformed them with pen, ink, and watercolour to create fragmentary memories, moments held in time. Whether they are real or not, I do not know but as a fan of multimedia work, his creation sparked my imagination.
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