With the distance learning starting to reach fever pitch & half term fast approaching….(yay!) we find ourselves in the glorious grips of a snow storm. I love love snow, frost, hoarfrost……all of it. Everything looks clean & bright…..blanketed, twinkling & a sense of peace descends along with it. I like watching it and I like walking in it and just being in it. As a child I was transfixed by it, sitting in a window and just watching it fall was just magical to me.

The light that transmits inside from the new brighter outside also got me thinking about ways to photograph my work and to give it more of the narrative I have been looking for.

So, I had a bit of a play with some new prints…….some nice things started to happen…..mainly I was having fun!

I started to combine things together…..prints and objects…..related to each-other. Whilst I did my mucking about photoshoot, it all started to make more visual sense. I have come to realise that it takes time to build your website and it actually takes more time to mould it into the shape you are happy with. Well, this is my website story anyway!

I am praying once more to the snow gods for this weekend…..

So, I have booked in the snowfall and the photographer and now I will make notes about ways to photograph the prints and to build the sense of narrative to the work.

As this blog post is about celebrating snow days and how ideas started to fall along with it, I will share some works I discovered years ago.

At university I recall researching the screen-print work of Robert Rauschenberg and falling in love with his ‘Hoarfrost’ series, printed directly onto fabrics.

‘Groundings’ Hoarfrost - Robert Rauschenberg 1975

Encouraged by his astrologer to live closer to water, Rauschenberg abandoned New York and relocated to Captiva, Florida, in 1970. The new location, coupled with the artist’s increased travel abroad, inaugurated a new experimentalism in his work that was grounded in unusual materials like cardboard as well as the silk and linen used here. Pictures transferred from newspapers and encyclopaedia’s hover and blur as if printed upon smoke or an icy frost (an idea evoked by the series title, Hoarfrost); while humble currents of air, like those occasioned by bodies as they pass, continue to animate the work.

‘Cactus Custard’ Hoarfrost Robert Rauschenberg 1975

Rauschenberg discovered the image transfer process by accident after noticing that the cheesecloths used to clean etching plates retained part of the image.

This is a really cool way to transfer ready made images and I remember trying it out with my own students using smelly solvents and magazine & photocopy images. They leave a ghostly image behind once transferred.

So, maybe next week’s blog post can reveal how I got on with updating parts of the website and finding a new way to photograph my works…….funny how the snowfall challenged my own perceptions of my work….even to the way I title them before adding them to my online store…..yes I am changing that too!

Things are slowly feeling more renewed and that feels really good…..

Until next time!

Snow days...

kim minuti