This work is centered on my experience as a woman, a survivor, a host. It acts as a proof of my existence. My photographic images are drawn from stories, dreams, and feelings about my own experiences and illustrate struggles that I and many women face through their lives. My title comes from the poem Planetarium by Adrianne Rich, which, to me, represents the universal struggles of women — with a spin on defiance and perseverance. I am interested in the complexity of being a woman biologically, socially and historically.
My photographs are made with the wet-plate collodion technique, commonly used in the late -19th century. The slow process of pouring the sticky, volatile, and flammable emulsion, which records my experiences for centuries to come, allows me to embrace my past gradually. As I carefully mix acid, alcohol and salt to let the molecules work together to bring the latent images alive, I wonder about and consider my body as a collection of cells that encompass my ancestral history and that also carry traces of my children — dead and alive. For me, noble metals I use interpret and capture the intrinsic value of a female body and soul.
Planetarium
by Adrianne Rich
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
