Solstice Rite

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In October of this year, I crawled into the bogs of the family lakeshore, hoping to create an image I had been dreaming of for nearly the entire year. It was an itch in the back of my brain that could not be scratched until parts of my life could parallel.  As it is with art, and timing.

In the sinking mud and the chill of October's evening light, hip-deep in decayed lily pads and summertime lake detritus, we made this image.  It would be the only one we needed, although there would be a hundred more that captured the shock of the coldness, the comedy of this absurd thing we were doing, the chaos of what it's like to try and take pictures in 5 feet of mucky, sticky, sinking lakeside with a very expensive camera, one set of waders, a neoprene body suit, and a paddle board. It felt crazy, but sometimes vision doesn't make any sense at all.  Sometimes, the project and the outcome are so detached from eachother, it sort of doesn't matter what happens.  As long as it does.

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It has been a childhood habit of mine, since as far as I can remember, to wiggle my toes when my attention wavers from something I need to still be present for, as if to explain to my brain that yes, my body is here, and we're STILL doing this thing called thinking. It's like meditating, but more playful than all the serious things we hear about meditation. It's the way I've connected myself to my surroundings when my brain starts to float, since as long as I can remember. I wiggled fiercely to connect myself with the grand canyon and her terrible churning whitewater 9 years ago, and I still see if I can get my toes to move in my snowboard boots every time I get off a chairlift in uneasy flat light. In the lake, at this particular moment, I wiggle my toes so that I don't fall head-first into the coldest water my upper body has maybe ever been in, so I don't capsize, but also so I don't scream out loud that this is the worst idea I've ever had. As my wet sock-like shoes take on more and more gross water between each click of the shutter, I question this entire project, and the sanity of both myself and my dear friend turned art director/photographer/water-defier Katie Wood. What the actual fuck were we doing?  Why October?  Why didn't we try this in August, when the swim would have been warm, and actually enjoyable?  Was this even going to work?  Was this a complete and total waste of time? Am I crazy? Are we? What if everything we capture sucks? What if the camera ends up in the water?  Time zips quickly along with every camera click, and my arms become numb.  I wiggle my toes again.

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Katie has helped me conjure magic in front of a camera over the years I've come to know and work with her.  Her eye behind the lens has given me a new appreciation for my thin shoulders, square jawline, and crooked roman nose.  She finds the light and the story that sometimes I can feel, but can't quite conjure into visual existence.  We have shot photos for jewelry, photos for mental health, photos for the feminine divine in a cabin far away from suburban life. She is more gregarious and patient with each absurd thing I pitch her, and we decide this late summer, that this gold facepaint water inspiration MUST happen, but the weather was nearly calling for snow, and we were running out of time.  I didn't tell her then, but I had hoped she would say yes to this project when I first dreamt it up anyway, and I knew that without her nudge and interest, it would not ever come to be.  So here we were, in late October, the weekend before the first snow, waist-deep in the coldest lake water in Northwest Montana.  Katie is in fishing waders from her time in Wyoming's rivers, desperately clinging her upper body and camera position on a paddle board not really wanting to stay still. She is laughing. I am cursing.  We are cursing.  We are laughing. 

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Being in front of the camera is something that I have never felt very comfortable with. I took photography in high school, when cameras had film and seventh period was also the darkroom open studio. I fell in love with the anonymity a young adolescent woman craves behind a camera, capturing things that felt artistically groundbreaking, at least, for a 16 year old.  The cracks in a sidewalk.  The neon light of an old weekly nightly motel on the corner of that hometown sidewalk.  A friend smiling into the camera, one who would later go to college in California, and come back with an eating disorder. The lens, when I was young, was a way for me to document the importance of what I was experiencing, even though it was wildly and sometimes comically similar to every other teenager living in a middle-class farm-adjacent sprawling suburb. It felt like art, even though I would later learn that no, it wasn't, and the Art Institute in Denver didn't want me or my obviously very un-creative photos.  They didn't want my drawings either.

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For all the years I've spent doing creative things as a kid, through my acne-ridden adolescence, my leave-home-and-be-mad-about-the-world young adulthood, and for the last 15 years as a jewelry designer and metalsmith, I wouldn't have always called myself an artist.  In fact, I shuddered at the title most of it, and I find this rejection of the title to be one of the more common threads in most of the very creative people I have come to know in my life.  Painters.  Sculptors.  Videographers.  People with awards and gallery representations and publishers in Los Angeles.  Everyone who's ever made something for no real reason, just chasing a thought or an experience or a moment, and nailing its tail to the floor, has doubted their claim to the fame of artist.  It's as if the definition exceeds the capacity, and anyone who has ever had a creative interest immediately recognizes this nudge as someone who WANTS to be an artist, but obviously could never. It's the one thing I wish I could have embraced earlier, or at least told 16 year old me that the role of Artist is something you can be at any time in your life, and at any capacity.  With words.  With gardens.  With photos.  With clothes.  With jewelry. It's not so much the medium, as the intent of the creative whim, and whether you have the discipline to see this whim through. You can make art in a coldwater bog if you want.  It's art if you say it is.  And that's the truth.

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In the recesses of what I THOUGHT I was going to make, and what Katie and I actually did make, was this at its core.  If you say it is art, it is.  This image was easier to bring into being because not knowing how it was actually going to look gave it freedom. The title of ART let it come to be in whatever form, without goals or objectivity, and didn't really need to make sense, or money. It's something I struggle with often in my studio practice, and this picture has come to be a bit of a beacon of 'fuck it! let's stand in a lake!'  I tend to cling to the 'should' and the 'can't' when it comes to creativity.  When it comes to capacity, I know I can do more, both in the studio and as a creative person. But the getting there, and the bills, tend to always get in the way.  So for the new year, and going forward, I would like to approach things differently, exercising creative muscles more so they ripple in strength over lots of different fields, letting them loosely be defined as 'art', letting the title give me freedom instead of restriction. The bank account will just have to trust that this could work.  Go stand in a bog and make beautiful things, the future seems to call.  Go stand in a bog with friends and enjoy your life. 

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As it is with all new years ahead, I find myself reflecting.  The Winter Solstice and the next year approaching fast is just as much an excuse to plan for newness as it is to retell the story of what a year gone by looked like, how it felt, what was gained, and lost. For me, 2024 was a very difficult year.  Professionally, I felt as though I was losing my steam as a creative maker and felt not just stagnant, but downright stuck.  Lost, even.  I constantly found myself revisiting old ideas.  Old designs.  Old systems.  I found comfort in the same.  And for what it's worth, it saved me.  Personally, 2024 was bound with some of the hardest family problems mine has ever come to weather, and we barely made it. Depression is a funny cloud you didn't know you were in until you drive away from it. For all the highs of 2024, I am so grateful.  It was the lightness that always kept the heaviness from winning, and I am lucky to have had a lot of light. Without sounding too dramatic, I hope this year will come to see the transparency it deserves when distance can be seen in that rear-view, when young children are much older, and have cameras or quirky ways of making art on their own, and ways of expressing themselves when words don't cut it.  It has been the common denominator in much of my life and how I understand it, dealing with the complexity of growing up alongside a camera or pad of paper or paintbrush.  Sometimes, it's all that can be done.  Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps us afloat.

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Solstice is a latin term of two words:  Sol, for the sun, and Stice meaning 'standing still'.  A moment in time where the Sun literally feels as though it has transcended its patterns, and lays still in the celestial sky.  It is important to get really quiet, and stand still in the story of the year gone past.  It's important to get really still so that when the momentum starts again, it is not without some brevity.  Go gently.  But go.  Don't forget. But don't get stuck. Find clarity. But don't search so long that you forget that it is also sometimes the unlikely and absurd story of your life that finds you tippy-toed on a block in a bog holding your breath in 40 degree water in October's coldest week in order to make a photograph with gold light like liquid love, pouring down your face and pooling around you. And you yell, FUCK! and then laugh with gleeful abandon. When dipping so far below the comfort, you nearly topple into cold darkness surrounding you, but you don't. Toes wiggle and balance regains. And you have one beautiful image in all the absurdity to prove to yourself that lightness in darkness is all that ever really mattered anyway.

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