If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. – Walter Benjamin Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
As a child, I remember the moment I first observed a shadow moving. As the sun set, that summer evening, I felt small, powerless, and dizzy by the thought of how fast the earth must have been moving. The series “Shadow in Motion” is a collection of cyanotypes I created in collaboration with the sun and earth. Each image is an exposure of an object’s shadow during a one hour exposure. As the shadow moves across the paper, the sun produces a recording of the earth as it rotates. Before the paper is exposed, I can only guess as to where the shadow will be and what the final image might look like. Will it move off of the paper? Will there be a discernible mark? When the photograph is developed, the warped, stretched, markings of time are made visible.
In order to produce these images, I customized my cyanotype chemistry allowing for longer exposure times. The objects vary based on my location. Larger shadows like a fence, are cropped revealing only the section I’ve chosen to capture. The images below were made during quarantine using small glass objects in my apartment. I chose glass objects to explore an allegory about transparency, opacity and distortion. I was restricted by the window size and the time of day the sun poured into the western facing windows.
