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.