#26 - hello spring 🌼
listening to: lacuna and parlor by More Eaze
saying hello to you from hyde park at sunset today :) (no capitalisation for now, i don’t feel like it hehe)
i’ve been feeling the urge to write to you today, and once again, i feel proud to be honouring this wish. i’m sat at hyde park right now, watching the sun go down.
i mentioned it last time i wrote here but i have been really enjoying sheila heti’s books, it’s been an invigorating exercise in understanding that the writing i most love isn’t very concerned with itself and mostly concerned with the kind of relationship it forges with its writer. writing has become more and more like a friendly activity, one to which i have been moving towards with a sense of deep curiosity and desire for intimacy.
related to my writing:
next week, i am travelling to portugal to create the photography for my book and album, alongside my dear friend daniel padgett - photography genius.
we will be flying over and driving down to the beach i grew up going to every summer, the beach that has shaped so much of the imagery in my book and music for this release.
we have a set of themes to explore and a little bit of a schedule in a very tidy notion page that i had such pleasure putting together (i love tidy things).
even though the book has a lot of repeating themes - erosion, sediment, memory, deletion, blood, tubes - each chapter chooses its own more intense focus, which is how we’ll be structuring the photography day.
chapter 1 we will be capturing me at the shoreline. seaweed, silt (/sand) and the feeling of being spat out by the tide. messy! dirty! gross! - i’m excited.
chapter 2 we will be focusing on framing and interacting with tubular shapes that really inspired this part of the book. looking through tubes, bending perception, looking at the world through altered frame. distortion of memory I suppose.
chapter 3 focuses on pain, pain of birthing vs pain of rooting. friction, movement and resisting vs surrendering to land. i imagine a lot of hands buried in sand etc.
chapter 4 is the perspective of the wave, so photography from inside the ocean. letting go, perhaps letting an old photograph be erased by the moving tide.
this beach has lived in my memory for so long, and i wonder what it will feel like to return there with a new purpose - to translate something internal into something visible.
some photographers that have inspired my research for this: uta barth, francesca woodman, rinko kawauchi.
i feel excited by this slow reawakening and i hope to keep the desire to explore and share parts of myself.
more soon, it’s getting darker now so i must go home - happy spring, wherever you are. 🌼
thank you for being with me,
ana xx