Handmade Lenticular studies

Last fall I started a series roughly called "Common Ground", which I've now renamed "Ordinary Ground" as it fits better. They are images of ordinary ground to everyone except me. I put it on the shelf throughout the school year as is the way of the full-time Professor! But now that school has ended I'm making my way back into the studio to finish it. This week I have been doing some handmade lenticular studies of these pieces. One photo is from Saarijarvi, Finland taken in an area I visited last summer, and the other is from Beach Pond, Connecticut, where I grew up. The same, yet different.

Here are a few low-tech videos of folded paper tests before I order the real lenticular image. I'm interested in how the files look broken down to split the image as well. 

Common Ground tests

In June of this year I received a travel grant to go to Finland to work on a body of work about walking through landscapes I have lived in, and the effect it has on my body and memory.  In Finland I explored a forest landscape that I had never lived in but one that was from my mother's ancestry and is visually very similar to the one in Connecticut that I grew up in. 

It is probably well-known to world adventurers but it was my first time traveling overseas and I was struck by how simultaneously alike and how different the people I met were as well. Certainly the internet has connected the world visually in a whole new way, but I didn't expect the actual "mirror world" experience described by William Gibson in one of my favorite books, Pattern Recognition. Where everything is the same, but just slightly askew. 

I'm editing images now and deciding how they will fold into a larger scale installation I am working on about this idea. These are some photo "sketches" for an piece called "Common Ground", which is loosely about the land in both places looking so much alike that it is hard to tell where each one is located,  but one is imbued with deep memories, and one has nearly none.

A Lot of Going Nowhere

Watercolor monotypes.