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.

Lensculture Critics Choice 2022 winner

My Vessel collection series was a winner in the lensculture Critics Choice awards 2022: “The images in Rebecca Horne’s series “Vessel Collection” are brilliant illusions that play with the ideas of volume, depth and containment, while challenging the two-dimensional flatness of a photograph. They look deceptively simple, and the execution of their ideas seems flawless. Each image in the series presents a different take, providing a pleasing rhythm and adding to the sense of wonder.” Jim Casper of lensculture

Valence Inventory poster ready to ship

Introducing Valence Inventory, a playful photographic take on atomic preferences — the joining patterns of elements in the periodic table. Valence can be deduced from the relative position of each element in the table. Valence Inventory is available as a 23x35”poster, digitally printed on 50 lb. Durotone. The poster design is by Francesca Richer, printed by Puritan Press. You can order it here: https://www.rebeccahornephotography.com/shop

Valence Inventory is a grid of 25 images closely related to each other in color, shape and form.

Why Valence? Because observation leads to more linked paths, planes and values. Why Inventory? Because Minecraft players get an object inventory on a grid. Because I love collections of images. Because I have a storehouse of shapes and images.

Why make a poster? It seemed like it would be a lighthearted way to share what I’ve been working on.

The Alchemist

Oliver is growing before my eyes, and I am rushing to shoot this project with him before he sheds all vestiges of childhood. It has been a pleasure to shoot this with him—he is a really good model. He is willing to humor me and to inhabit the scenes and vignettes with grace.

We also laugh a lot because some of it is so silly. The idea for this series came from The Alchemist, an allegorical book by Paulo Coelho about the journey of a shepherd boy. Oliver recommended it to me and then I read it too—we both really liked it. Initially the plan was a series of four images charting the boy’s journey and epiphanies, but it has become bigger than that. My guess is that this series may never be Great, but it will likely be interesting. It is a collaboration, and one of the more challenging things I’ve attempted as an artist, so I will keep at it.

Air basket process

I recently declared that I was done with vessels—I was moving on! Mainly, I don’t want to repeat myself, and I’m interested in a lot of other directions.

But none of that matters, because, as it turns out, I just have to keep doing what I am interested in. Otherwise, what is the point? So somehow, here I am again—shooting more vessels. As the gallerist Brian Clamp recently reminded me, there is nothing wrong with having a theme.

I just hope that I am truly getting better and going deeper, not just making the same image over and over again, in ever more refined terms. To me, this image has a hint of a clumsy archeology display and/or explanatory literature, where so much is conjecture.

I feel pleased with this picture, but it didn’t come together instantly. It was the result of weeks of experimenting with a ‘basket’ form. I saw this very cool basket at the textile show at MOMA a while back, it was a very loose weave so that the form seemed to be to be a special kind of air basket. A vessel with indistinct boundaries, maybe. The artist is Ed Rossbach, but I am only interested in his basket, below, not his other work. It was also the only object in the show that could have been an artifact in basic archeological sense.

by Ed Rossbach

Some of the experimentation involved drawing the basket several times, then shooting the drawing in various ways and more. You can see some of it here in the sketchbook page, below, along with an early version of the orbit paths image I have been working on.

Video tour of my show at Galerie Confluence

Galerie Confluence sent a short video tour of my exhibit. It is exciting to see the different print sizes together—the giant mural of the lunar calendar, the two floors, and most importantly, viewers! Actual people looking at my pictures. Intently. For a long time.

I am sure artists with more exhibition experience are nonchalant about this, but I can’t help being pleased and kind of amazed.

It is amazing to think how this polished looking show started with me puzzling over the gallery floor plan and test strips all over the living room floor. I am so grateful that I had all this work for the show and the book to keep me busy during the worst parts of the pandemic. It has kept me sane.

I mailed the second half of the books today, and nearly all of the small prints. Still to send: a few of the larger prints, and some books and smaller prints to the people who haven’t sent me their addresses. It seemed I would never get to the end of this mailing task, but it is happening! Hooray for the post office. I only had to wait 40 minutes instead of the usual hour to get to a clerk. Partial view of the usual line below. This is before you even get into the lobby!

"Buried Intentions" installed at Galerie Confluence

It’s been both exciting and sad to see the photos of the installation of my show “Buried Intentions” at Galerie Confluence in Nantes, France. It looks great, and it is gratifying to have a solo show with a gallery that believes in the work. This is the culmination of months of hard work, riding my bike to Duggal labs early in the morning before work to view tests and finals, slaving over color correction and calling in favors from my old friend and Photoshop expert Alex Hestoft when I was overwhelmed by color correcting issues. One challenge of the show was balancing all the whites—there were a lot of different whites that had to look good next to each other. And some of these were underexposed images, so balancing was tricky.

The sad part is that because no international travel is allowed, and my country is a mess, as an American I most likely I won’t be allowed into France see the show. In one of the photos of the installation I can see some cobblestones and some graffiti on the street—makes me really want to see this place!

Kickstarter fully funded

I am so relieved the Kickstarter was a success! It was a bumpy, emotional marathon of anxiety and excitement. Would anyone be interested? Would anyone care about an art book exploring the ‘metaphysics of daily life”? Undertaking what felt like a relentless campaign of self promotion would be challenging for me under normal circumstances, never mind in the middle of a global pandemic and waves of institutional violence and murders by the police.

I struggled with this for the entire campaign. You can’t pause a Kickstarter—you get 30 days and that’s all. My book, in the works for 4 years, needs to be published by September in time for my exhibit at Galerie Confluence.

Fortunately, my friends old and new, acquaintances and complete strangers were supportive and happy to see the Pseudologia book and to learn about the project. I was so grateful for all the positivity that people shared.

I am so grateful to all the friends, family and supporters that made this possible. Pledges came from all sorts of unexpected places, including my friends who are freelancing and may not be in the most stable situations. I feel so blessed to accept this gift from my community.

I looked at the final layout of Pseudologia last night, and it is so exciting to see it coming together. It does look good. I am nervous and excited to see the test from the printer.

Going out and demonstrating every week and consistently showing my support for Black Lives Matter in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and elsewhere in the city, as well as donating to bail funds and other orgs is something that has made me feel a little bit more hopeful about where we are as a country. We have to make dramatic changes: defunding the police, planning for restitution, abolishing institutional racism.

Right now, I’m learning and listening to be a better ally and supporter of BLM. I am also working to actively hire more POC and Black people as an art director, and working to better educate my son about institutional racism. I am also aware that this is probably not enough, and that I need to do more, and also that I still have a lot to learn. The institutions that trained me are not diverse, and the art and photography world has a huge white male fixation.