Studio Stimulus late summer: Naked in the woods, computational art concepts, Ai confessions

Department of Inspiration: Naked in the woods

Now that I’m back in Brooklyn, surrounded by cars and construction noise, it is hard to believe that I spent most of last week in the woods tracking light and shadow across a meadow. I joined another photographer friend for a blessed week of uninterrupted art-making in a beautiful house in Woodstock with tree views from every window. I staked out a meadow as my outdoor studio and staging area. From there, I could shoot with relative privacy in the woods, with its pine needle carpet, or soft mossy areas rife with mushrooms and tall grasses. Why nudity, you ask? Because this project is in conversation art history which is inseparable from depictions of the naked female body. 

After I got used to it, it was fun being naked/partly dressed/play-acting in the woods, but acting as model and photographer meant I had little control, and everything took much longer. None of my friend-models were available. After a few frustrating days, I suddenly got lucky. One day, while out and about, a striking woman materialized in front of me, wearing a lavender that matched my Clay Feet palette from head to toe. I took a deep breath and asked her to model. It was a joy working with Stephanie. This is Stephanie as the goddess Fortuna, who is often depicted at the helm of a boat or navigating using her dress as a sail. 

I worked on the image, below, for several days, as the window of light in the location was very short, and I had to try out painting styles and dresses. August 24th Journal entry: The day started with a quick fashioning of a dress from canvas, then gathering gear and racing down the hill in the wet grass to the pyre to shoot. Does it feel cathartic to take control of the depiction of a woman being burned at the stake? Yes and no. On trial here is the role of the artist and spectator too. I like the idea that the eye/mind can fill the rest of the image. Hopefully the suggestion is enough. 

Department of Inspiration: Art Directing

This summer, at The Transmitter, we've had a run of essays by neuroscientists on topics close to my own areas of research: blind sight, lucid dreaming and infantile amnesia. 

I spoke on an ASBPE panel about Ai where I blasted the narrative of inevitability and the anthropomorphizing marketing language of Ai, but also discussed working with a handful of artists who are using Ai imaginatively, including making their own computational tools: Danielle Ezzo, Derrick Schultz and most recently, Ivona Tau, whose feminist project UnBeautiful caught my eye last year. 

Beyond generative Ai, I’m conceptualizing a seemingly endless supply of computation-related ideas, as neuroscience becomes increasingly dominated by machine learning. For a series of essays for a European neuroscience conference the illustrator Ibrahim Rayintakath and I decided on a soft black and white palette with limited color to explore these ideas: Blending diverse data, refining models with brain tuning, documents readable by humans and LLMS, and scientific knowledge as tapestry.  

I was excited to find other people that are creating alternatives to cliched and misleading images about Ai. I must confess, I have contributed to Ai cliches as an Art Director at least twice: once with an Ai "sparkle" and once with a robot hand. But never again! As I iterate on machine learning illustrations, it is meaningful to find artwork I’ve commissioned rising to the top of internet searches for computational science concepts. 

Artist News

Pen and Brush accepted Clay Feet into their archive.

Clay Feet will be included in the FotoSlovo Platforms Project in Athens in September.

Griffin Museum will show a Clay Feet image in an upcoming NEPR online exhibit.

Dear Dave Magazine published one of my images for a recent promotion.

Studio Stimulus Early Summer edition 2026

Catalyst: inspiration / collaboration / news / miscellany

Department of inspiration

In The Power of Images, David Freeberg describes a Chinese ceremony where the painter must add the eyes of a figure last, painted backwards in a mirror, so he doesn’t look directly at the eyes. Once the eyes are completed, the painter himself has a dangerous gaze. He is blindfolded and given a sword. Once the blindfold is removed he then destroys whatever is in front of him to rid himself of the evil. 

The practice of executions of effigies and public paintings of wrongdoers being punished or executed (executio in effigie) have been recorded since 1200, and was considered worse than actually being executed or tortured. The anecdotes suggest a confusion between the thing depicted and the thing itself. Verisimilitude, veracity, likeness, fear of images, desire for images, aniconism, iconoclasm -- what is the cognitive function of these effects and responses?

Are images themselves a technology we haven’t evolved to fully understand, or do we understand them too well? 

One advantage of my job is that I will keep reading the latest neuroscience, especially now that images, memory, speech and even intended speech in the brain are located and mapped with increasing accuracy and range. But I don’t expect to find the answers, only clues. 

Collaboration

After telling myself there wasn’t any room for hysteria related images in Clay Feet, they have arrived anyway. I’ve been delaying shooting them partly because I’m afraid of their psychological intensity. Even though Warburg did not include any images directly from Charcot, Warburg’s nymphs and the hysterics are sometimes one and the same. A computational analysis of the figures in the Mnemosyne Atlas, revealed that dissonant / conflicting movement of arms and legs in opposite directions were a uniting feature. These movements were also observed in the women of the Salpetriere. 

Following an ebb in inspiration, I’ve been energized by shooting new images related to the idea of images/archives held in the body. The latest images are located somewhere between consuming the archive, expelling it, and/or avenging nymphs. Also the projection of male anxiety. Elaine Showalter, in “The Female Malady” quotes T.S. Eliot from his poem “Hysteria” 

“As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.”

I’m so grateful to have friendships with other artists and photographers who are willing to model for me. An image from this weekend’s hysteria related shoots shown in the book’s layout, with my photographer/artist friend Cornelia Hediger modeling.

News

Proud to announce that the stellar curatorial team at Der Greif selected my work for a Featured Artist gallery:

I reviewed portfolios of up-and-coming creatives for The One Club for Creativity in May.

I'll be speaking on a panel about AI and images at the ASBPEvolve conference next week.

Miscellany / Recent art faves

• Dialing a poem at Giorno Poetry Systems. To dial-a-poem from your mobile: 718 957-2379.  This old concrete loft space with uncomfortable orange chairs, a Buddhist shrine and dial-a-poem phones made me nostalgic for a time when artists were better at art than at marketing.

• Watching the Sarah Lucas sculpture being installed in front of the New Museum, and the insane, messy, imperfect, infuriating and worthwhile New Humans show, and especially the Hito Steyrel video Mechanical Kurds.

• Photography Network tour of Ideas of Africa show at MOMA from Curator Oluremi C. Onabanj.
  

Studio Stimulus spring edition: Art history time machine, botanical vomit, PhD proposal

Department of Inspiration

In the reflected light from the latest snowstorm bouncing into my studio, I found myself taking pictures again. What a relief — I am still an artist. 

For months, I’ve been working nonstop on a PhD proposal connecting neuroscience, art history and feminist theory, so I’ve barely stepped foot into the studio.

An underlying impulse within the project is a kind of spell-casting. I'm trying to step back in time to redirect history. In my artworks and in the writing, I’m attempting to occupy objectifying, voyeuristic art histories with active female agents. One reason I’m fascinated by the Mnemosyne Atlas is that I think it can be a time machine, one that might renegotiate art history. 

I'm working on the last images to go into my book — taken directly from the Mnemosyne Atlas. In this spread, the image on the left is a detail of the nymph Chloris’s face from Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera painting. Nymphs are central to Aby Warburg’s idea of the pathosformeln (pathos-formulas, body gestures) traced across time.

In the Primavera, Chloris is seized by Zephyrus. The Ovidian myth is one of rape, abduction, and ownership through marriage — her name transformed to Flora. In the painting, her face shows no signs of real fear, though her exposed body turns in an attempt to escape. Dark flowers fall from her mouth, creating a rupture — a discreet vomiting into the scene. Insect-like, with dramatic roots, they echo the extractive, violent uprooting of Chloris herself.

This detail from Mnemosyne panel 39 shows cropped insets of the faces of Chloris and Zephyrus from the Primavera. Insets or enlarged details are unusual in the Atlas, suggesting that Warburg found it significant.

When I made the above photo of myself with the black vine, I thought I was making a medusa image. I was not aware of the connection to Botticelli’s Chloris. I hadn’t consciously registered the image yet. It was only afterwards, noticing Chloris's flower vomit, that I realized that I must have absorbed it subconsciously.

This moment, where the camera realizes and identifies subconscious images before I’ve made the connection, is one of the questions I’m digging into in the PhD proposal, asking: how do images live in the body and how are they expressed? 
 

News/Collaborations in brief:

• I’m in the home stretch with the Clay Feet book — a new body of photographs have rounded it out and set up a strong ending. 

• I produced a video about the first black female European neuroscientist for Black History Month at The Transmitter with Angie Voyles Askham.  

• My work will be hosted in a Der Greif artist feature in April. 

• On March 9th I gave an artist talk for the Golden Kin photographers collective in Kingston, NY. 

winter edition of Studio Stimulus: Shooting outdoors, inspirational archives, Lensculture interview, new work and more

Department of Inspiration

A few weeks ago I visited the Warburg Institute in London--a place that has loomed large in my imagination since I discovered Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. At the library desk, I nervously presented my recommendation letters to gain access to this world where the books are shelved according to the “law of the good neighbor”, in unique, kindred arrangements. I leafed through exquisite, rare books, read up on curses in the stacks among the science and magic books (science and magic, together!). I spent hours poring over a massive folio of the Mnemosyne Atlas panels--it was so big I had to turn the pages while standing. I toured the photo archive and handled artifacts that changed my understanding of the original panels.

Eyes glaze over when I mention the Mnemosyne Atlas, so I’m offering this image--a digital collage of my own images layered on top of Atlas panel 39, to show one of my most direct visual interactions. I printed it large recently and it works well.
 

My newest images explore the idea of the archive and the Atlas as a mental architectural and visual graphical space. In the test layout below, you can see the panel background and the bookshelves beyond it, but not the images themselves.

News

• I was interviewed by Sophie Wright about Clay Feet on Lensculture, where, for better or worse, I tell the personal backstory of the project.

• My work was exhibited in a group show hosted by FotoSlovo in Cyprus, Greece.

• In September I went to the Filter Photo festival in Chicago to show prints and the book mockup of Clay Feet. It was gratifying to hear the words original, fresh and exciting applied to the work by experts. It was also very cool to be introduced to the work of overlooked Italian artist Ketty LaRocca, in a show of performance based photography at the MoCP.  

• Self-funded residency: In August I shared a house in Catskill, NY with a photographer friend, Jennifer Karady, and her partner. We accelerated our work by talking through plans and modeling for each other. We collected botanical specimens, cooked and swam. I shot outdoors and loved having space around me. It was highly productive, but I worked in a state of near frenzy, because having my days free to work in a new setting was unusual and precious. 

A few favorite things from 2025

Art: Insoumissions by Francine Saillant and Camille Courier, St. Louis Chapel, Paris, France, Louis Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth, Jack Witten at MOMA, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Met.

Article: Some People Can’t See Mental Images and the Consequences are Profound, by Larissa MacFarquhar.

Beach: Sir Francis Drake Beach, Point Reyes, CA.

Book: Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries by Ludmilla Jordanova.

Distraction: Correspondence via paper letters.

Recipe: Lamb tagine.

Reporting/personal essay: I want you to understand chicago by Kyle Kingsbury.

Film: Something of Value

Open-water Swim: Ohio Street beach, Chicago, ILL.

Bookshelf: Paul Taylor's office, Warburg Institute, London.

NOTE: I'm looking for a strong feminist writer to pen the essay for Clay Feet, the book--please let me know if you have a suggestion.

Studio Stimulus: Summer Edition

Catalyst: Department of Inspiration
I'm working on a book mockup of Clay Feet, and it's exciting to see it adapt and expand. I'm discovering gaps in the story, so I'm still shooting new images. Casting models from a wider pool has been great. It was helpful to realize that the images about my personal experience make sense as self-portraits, but the more tightly art history related images should be other characters. 

I've started making my own Mnemosyne Atlas style image clusters. Alternately satisfying and frustrating, these image groupings are generating new ideas  and sub-categories while getting me closer to the encyclopedia-like book I’ve been craving. The breast-chain image on the left is a self-portrait I made last summer about a kind of monstrous femininity, one that does not care to nurture. On the right is an example of one the groupings. 

Sample page layout from my Clay Feet mockup

My Muse: Scholar and Werewolf
In order to focus on the Atlas images, I've avoided reading about Aby Warburg himself, but I recently read an article I’d been saving. Turns out, he was afraid that he was turning into a werewolf! Is it possible that the images in the Atlas may have been the result of a mania or a kind of talisman collecting? Warburg had a medallion of Fortuna, and he was obsessed with it. He even accused his wife of stealing it, but then admitted that he had probably hidden it. Did he see the creatures and monsters in his Atlas as his cohort, or as protectors, or as terrifying reminders of his own condition?

At the Salpêtrière
At the beginning of July, I went to the International Society for the History of Neuroscience conference celebrating the 200th anniversary of Jean-Martin Charcot’s birth, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris. It was like going to grad school inside a walled medical city, and I loved every minute.

I learned about early neuroscience-but I was also haunted by the spectacle of the semi-naked ‘hysterical’ woman, the specimen with the white nightgown forever slipping off. One image, showing the so-called Arc de Cercle, kept resurfacing. Even the notorious Brouillet painting of Charcot includes a drawing of a female body locked in Arc de Cercle, on the far wall. 

A highlight was an exhibit in the Chapel Saint-Louis church. The nave was taken over by an impressive exhibition about the women and men who were patients, by the artists Camille Courier and Francine Saillant.

Dept of collaboration
In Paris I met in person with the brilliant gallery co-directrice Emilie Houssa, from the Centre Claude Cahun, and the talented Parisian photographer Céline Clanet and shared my book mockup. I love Clanet's thought-provoking book Second Skin and it was incredible to hold it in my hand and turn the pages. 

In early summer I had an epic Zoom studio visit with Melanie Manos, multimedia badass, performance artist and professor whose work inserts women into public spaces, sometimes virtually, sometimes physically. Her tricky mosaic images fit her body into claustrophobic spaces-detail below. 

“Aand Stretch” detail, courtesy of Melanie Manos

News

• This week I will be participating in a panel discussion, Science Illustrated for the lecture series Simons Presents, at the Simons Foundation on Friday night, July 18th. It’s sold out, so wish me luck. 

• I wrote about Brazilian photographer Gui Christ’s project M’kumba for Lensculture, which schooled me on Afro-Brazilian religions. As a journalist, it was challenging to describe how Christ changed direction in his photography project based on advice given by an ancestral spirit. But as an artist, I was jealous of his experience. 

• At work, I’ve been creating fast in-house illustrations for a host of breaking news articles on funding cuts and firings in science. The stories are heart-breaking, but it feels good to be able to do at least this one thing.

• I was honored to review design and illustration portfolios for The One Club in Manhattan.

Miscellany
You can protect your artwork from being ingested by AI models by adding Glaze/Nightshade to your images. I haven’t applied it to my work yet but I want to. 
Inspo share: Public Domain Review archive: Search for anything and be amazed and delighted by the results.

Peace, from the Pantea hand, by Filippo Palizzi, courtesy of the Public Domain Archive. 

Thanks for reading! You can subscribe to Studio Stimulus from the Rebeccahornephotography.com About page. 

I hope this newsletter can reclaim space from social media, and allow for a deeper conversation. I'm still on IG @rebeccahorne600, mostly to keep up to date with other artists.

Fig Face

The protruding stem declares itself awkwardly and stubbornly, open for interpretation. It juts off the chin, lengthens, then abruptly ends in a clean break. It is a leaf-mask. It could be leather. Or machine-made in its perfection. But it isn’t. It is green. And soft. In pictures, this leaf covers genitals. This leaf is an accomplice to shame. The protruding stem announces itself. It is an extension of the body both delicate and rude. A symbolic phallus? A tiny trumpet?

The mask both hides and creates identity. The stem is an imagined phallus, a middle finger. What is the inversion of desire? Repulsion. It is a leaf, masking the age and the identity of the woman underneath, who confronts the viewer with a single eye. 

The woman is suffocating. Suffocating under the weight of images. There’s no light, no air underneath. An infinity of pages where the only women are the nude subjects in photographs by and for men. So women will see themselves as men see them. And so women admire men for their sensitivity and their brilliance in finding so many ways to look at women. 

For women to be reminded to stay on the other side of the door. Women must look at men looking at women and see ourselves as men do. Women must be two at all times: the perceived and the actual. Try to act natural.

It is hard to hold this pose. I picked the fig leaf, snapping the stem, wiping the milky white sap. The leaf makes a curved shape that embraces my face, its tiny hairs scratching my face. It is painful to keep my head tilted, and the leaf in place, but I’m compelled to.

In art, young women are symbols filled with meaning--innocence, grace, fortune. Old women are witches, or gorgons. Skip this version. Smash it. Write an entirely new story. Become feral. Rub sticks together. Become nature, wild and free.

Sarah Knobel's Clay Feet write-up published on Lenscratch

It’s such an honor to have Sarah Knobel write about my work—she is a talented artist that I admire as well as a writer and a professor and more. You can read the Lenscratch article here.

Ending 2024: New York Times assignment

Last week I got an assignment from the NYTimes—to illustrate an essay by Sloane Crosley on reader’s letters after the publication of her book about grief. It was an out of the blue ask—I didn’t know the assigning Art Director, Elana Schlenker. The deadline was tight and I had a redeye back from CA in the middle of it. But the AD was kind and clear, and we got it done on time.

In the past, art directors have reached out to me about assignments, and I’ve been cagey. This was because I felt that I’d have to create a collage or use illustrator or some other technique I’m only somewhat competent in to be able to address editorial concepts. But after the New York Times art director sent me examples of my work that she liked I realized she was hiring me to do what I am already doing. This might seem super obvious but it wasn’t to me. This is not my first assignment or editorial job—but it is the first one where I used the same skills and style I use in my artwork. I realize I can shoot conceptual photography on assignment—and it feels good.

Data pictures collection takes a turn

It’s been a mad, mad summer. At the start, I had a series of experiences that made see that the patriarchy is never really done with women. These experiences have been woven into the work as have the new feelings of independence that have given me license to experiment. It’ been a heady combination of anger, joy and discovery.

I’ve had to update my artist statement for this project—things have evolved: The Data collection invites contrast of dry data with the messy intimacy of food, fluids and emotion. Data is information, and the Collection tries and fails to quantify emotion, consumption, sex. 

Food, measured and allotted, translates into the space we take up in the world. Food is conduit for pleasure, connection, comfort, sustenance. Also control, and appetite. The alchemy of the ordinary. Paper stands in for abstraction, ideas, flatness, transcendence.

Lost and Found

This weekend I spent hours trying to realize the right technique that would reproduce little scribbles from notebook margins as larger objects in space. The doodles I collected were mostly made during therapy sessions so they had some psychological drama. But nothing conveyed the immediacy of the pen marks. I tried wire of various weights, paper, ink, etc. I really felt that I was going to solve the challenge but I did not. I decided to leave it for another time.
I moved on to editing of a group of images I’m calling Data Pictures and in the process, discovered that there were many beautiful images I had overlooked while I was in pursuit of a particular thing. Sometimes when I get single minded and focussed on one idea, I miss a host of others. I never finished shooting the group, and I saw that there was more to do. I’m excited about making the rest of the images for this collection.

Refining the Pours / Waterfalls

How abstracted can a subject be, before it is no longer recognizable? Can proximity to other images of the same subject reinforce recognition? This ongoing body of work started as a collection of pours and/or waterfall shapes in various states of change and abstraction. I want to create a rich rhythm of images that plays with iterations of a subject to understand how meaning can shift from image to image. I want to examine the similarities or differences, and what is measured between them.

The subject of water evolved from two sources--the first was a body of work on vessels I explored as objects of fluid potential, capable of filling up and emptying out. The second was an impulse to connect swimming with my artwork. After rediscovering swimming last spring, I wanted to explore muscle memory as echoed in visible shapes. 

With the pours / waterfalls collection I'm trying to find the right level of simplification in different and flexible ways while also making a large group that ties together. Cutting the bigger shapes allows my body to interpret/make decisions as well. To find the shapes I sketch them on paper and then cut them out. The cutting takes the pressure off the act of drawing which feels weighed down by history, and creates instead an object in physical space.

Fall in Los Angeles, Paris and Washington DC

The photo above is a collection of images in my sketchbook. I’ve been working on this collection of grey on grey shapes that are based on waterfalls and pours without vessels. I’m challenging myself not to keep the cut shapes, but instead, to throw them away after shooting. The idea is that I draw/cut better when I work fast, and I think I will get better at it with more practice. I hope this will also help me hone the forms. With this series I’m struggling between the desire to have things be loose and messy, and the desire to let them be monumental.

Monumental pour/fall

Maybe I can do both messy, notational and monumental. I think I just need to keep shooting and then go back and see what shakes out. Some of these shapes have art-historical echoes: cubist guitars, landscape forms, etc. But I am actively avoiding those references. People get excited by these associations, but I don’t. I’m always after something else.

However, I recently interviewed Abelardo Morell about his new show at Edwynn Houk and wrote about it for Lensculture, so I have been thinking about this method of dialoging with well known art. I respect his and other artists direct engagement with art history. I just don’t want to do it myself, or at least not in a planned or deliberate way.

Outside of the studio, it has been a season of travel. After traveling to Los Angeles for the Adobe conference in October, I went to Paris Photo for the first time in November. Lucky for me, my press pass got me free access everywhere. I spent nearly 2 full days at the fair until my eyes were bursting, then spent more time looking at art elsewhere: Carolyn Drake’s exhibit at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as the Pompidou and the Picasso museum, currently thrillingly taken over by Sophie Calle. Evenings were full of delicious meals and conversation, and days were full of art and connecting with other artists.

With Ira Lombardia in front of her work, mounted on lazy susans at the Alarcon Criado booth

My phone’s battery was weak so I got around using a paper map and the metro. The streets kept me guessing, but the metro never let me down. It was rainy and cold, so it was a relief to arrive in Washington DC for the Society for Neuroscience conference, where it was sunny and the trees still had color. Highlights of the neuroscience conference included lectures on the mechanisms of the inner ear and the brain, the evolution of sleep in reptiles, and the launch party for the new Simons Foundation neuroscience publication, The Transmitter. Nonetheless, it was a relief to get home.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately—some about science and some about art. My review of Drake’s extraordinary book Men Untitled and my commissioned essay and photos for Berm magazine were published in November, and I have articles published at The Transmitter, including this favorite interview with two sailor-neuroscientists.

Summer of beginnings / endings

After leaving my son Oliver at college on Friday, I found myself traversing a bare and lonely mental space. I could hear the wind whistling in my ears. 

This person I had built my life around for seventeen years was leaving. He gave my life momentum, meaning and structure. Driving away, time stretched both forward and backwards—to the hospital where he was born, breastfeeding, catching him when he fell down the stairs. Now where was he? He was away. And moving ever further. 

In the days leading up to his departure, both of us were in shock. We shopped joylessly for his dorm room. We ate a rare meal at McDonald’s in the mall. We took the subway. I felt that I should be performing a tradition or ritual to mark the occasion but didn't have it in me.

Friends remind me that this separation repeats in mini cycles—they come home, and then leave again. I’m glad not to be the only person going through this, but I know that my bond with Oliver as a single parent and only child has an intense primacy. 

Then there is the question of the unfinished art project—The Alchemist. Oliver and I have been working on it for three years. We started it during the pandemic. Initially, the plan was that we would enact key moments from the book, as a series of photographs, with Oliver as the protagonist. In October 2020, I wrote:

Just finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho—a book that has been on my shelves, unread, until Oliver picked it up recently and read it. It is an allegory about a boy shepherd finding his treasure. The boy’s character is very pure and light and it suffuses the book, which is simply written, but rich in meaning. At the end of the story the actual treasure is found, but the boy’s life is so full and he has learned so much by the time he finds it, the treasure seems extraneous. The real treasures are his encounters with the Soul of the World, enabled by various teachers, his own good nature, and following his own destiny.

The book forced me to think more deeply about ideas like destiny. Much is written about how fortune favors those who follow it. Only not all of us have a king in disguise appear to us and reveal it. This line, “The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it is all written there,” stood out to me as beautiful. Could this be true?

His journey starts with a repeated dream, which he goes to a fortune teller about. Other themes are omens, and listening to your heart. The boy has some long conversations with his heart. 

He eventually learns to speak the Language of the World. In a dramatic scene, he talks to the wind and the sun and finally, he uses love and prayer to reach the hand that wrote all, in order to turn himself to wind. This is also where he understands for the first time that he is a part of the Soul of God. There is a line in the book where a wise person notes: A blessing ignored becomes a curse.

In our last days together, I was not able to shoot the Alchemist images I had sketched out. There was no way I could begin to approach making art. I will have to return to it next time I see him. I’m not sure this series will ever be fully complete, but I know I can bring it closer, and I think it may become a book.

Endings are not just new beginnings in disguise. They must be mourned and acknowledged. I must be like the boy on his journey—learn to be the wind, or to become one with it. Then the sound in my ears will be the sound of movement, passing through pain, becoming the world, not standing outside of it.

Hudson Valley Writers Residency

I’m writing from an antique fold-out writing desk on the parlor floor of an old rambling house in the historical district of Coxsackie. This house on Ely street is the Hudson Valley Writers Residency, just steps from the Hudson river. Today is my second full day here.

I’m here working on a new artist newsletter plan, as well as applications and of course taking some photos. I’ve been digging in on the writing. I made some progress this morning, writing away through tears. I want to start a newsletter that is personal but that also touches on broader themes. I’m not sure how to do this, but that’s why I’m here. Figuring it out.

Of all the newsletters I read, there are only two newsletters that I really love and that I can look to for inspiration. The first is illustrator/artist Carson Ellis’s Slowpoke. She writes endearingly on life, love, parenting, and art in the process. Second is Journalist/podcaster Rose Eveleth’s Bucket of Eels. An eccentric, original, intellectual treat.

Art therapy in the studio

Today’s studio time felt like therapy—it was a lot of emotional work. A lot of my work is highly sublimated—sometimes the intellectual part of me is in the forefront. But lately I’ve been wanting to welcome in some more physical immediacy to the work. The past month or so I’ve been grieving but also celebrating—in somewhat of a chaotic emotional space. 

I’ve been shooting a lot with some low angle light that creates inky shadows. I may not get a lot of studio time during the week but I do make up for it over the weekend by working my butt off. I try to stay current with my ideas during the week by checking in with my sketchbook, where I store my ideas and sketches. 

Today I broke up the studio time with a swim and a long walk. Sunday in Brooklyn was gorgeous, a reminder that not every summer day will be life-threateningly hot. Not yet. 

On Saturday I swam a section of an unsanctioned race/swim called the “Megaloop.” The penultimate distance was 6 miles. I swam 2 miles in very choppy water down to Manhattan beach with another CIBBOWS swimmer who was about my pace. It took a while and was hard because of the conditions, but I felt strong, and we finished our 2 miles happy and thirsty for fresh water.

Portrait or myth-making

The Alchemist series began as a kind of comic book but transformed over 3 years into a story about my son, Oliver. I think one of the most interesting tensions in the series is between allegory and myth and portraiture.

Some images are more one or the other. This one feels more allegorical—he is making eye contact, but the setting is deliberate and perhaps overpowering. This image may be about finding identity and grappling with beauty.

Today, I felt elation as I was shooting Oliver through the kitchen door. There he was! There he is. He is my most important project. We did it. He is almost launched. 

I try to keep my single motherhood out of the narrative of my art making, but for this project I can’t separate it. It is true there is a seven year gap in my artist CV. But look who came out of that. 

Oliver / Alchemist spring 2023

I’ve been shooting as much as possible with Oliver, who leaves in August for college. He’s been in art photos for me since around 3rd grade. By now, he knows a lot about my work, and as a model he can be very patient and intuitive. We both read Paul Coelho’s book The Alchemist during the pandemic, and I started a project photographing him as the protagonist. 

At first I was focussed on finding ways to interpret vignettes and moments from the book. Over time I’ve moved on to themes that include transformation, exploration, and transition. Some of the photos that I like the best are some of the in-between moments, when he is not acting the part or doing something I’m asking him to do, but maybe he is just petting the cat. In that way, portraits of him as a person are also part of it. I also realize some of the photos are about our relationship, too, and our journey as a small family of mother and son. 

Data pictures

I’m working on a new series of images that are related to the idea of data.

After an inspiring conversation a few months ago with postdoc fellow @centerforcomputationalquantumphysics @ol.gringas and others from @thekitchen_nyc I started thinking about systems of knowledge. For example, how many different approaches or systems or metaphors do we have for understanding new information, and could I collect them? These images are not exactly answering this question, but they are scratching the itch.