The following conversation took place between Mariela Sancari and myself via email correspondence between June 2020 - September, 2020. Mariela is an artist, award winning book maker, and educator who has offered guidance to me as I worked on this project. I am incredibly grateful for her patience, insight, and encouragement.

M: First of all, I would like to ask you to talk about the project: how and when did it start? what are your influences related this particular body of work? what ideas are you interested in exploring?

S: Hi Mariela, 

Thank you so much for  taking the time to talk with me about this exhibition. I am constantly inspired by the new directions you explore with your own work, so this is really both an honor and a delight for me.  

I began working on this project in 2016, wanting to explore inner tensions associated with female identity. VIrginia Woolf captures this tension with a quote I’ve been considering for many years.  ““But her passion, her disgrace, her humiliation are all acted in dumb show. They are hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.”   I felt compelled to investigate this idea of silence among women, and in my own life. I began to look more closely at how power dynamics determine emotional experience, define self perception, and impact even the most intimate of human relations.

Power can operate invisibly, creating a framework of socially prescribed behaviors designed to entitle some while silencing others. Inside this dynamic, I see silence manifest as a veneer. One that conceals and adorns the real narrative, over time influencing choices and directions in our lives. The complexity of fulfillment, particularly as it pertains to women and gender roles, collides repeatedly with forms of dominance. I learned that there are long term implications to keeping quiet. I am interested in how a passive voice can be isolating and eventually lead to feelings of anger, grief, and regret.  I want to understand the emotional space of these patterns and to explore the recurring force of these tensions. Virginia Woolf, and specifically Mrs. Dalloway, cuts through self deception and silence. 

While the concepts of this project are inspired by Woolf’s writing, my approach to making the work is influenced by contemporary collage, constructed still life, and the use of photographs as objects.  I use wave imagery, and domestic objects as artifacts to relate a state of being to shifts in the experience of interior /domestic moments. Emotional fluctuations like waves, have both a rhythm and a structure which I interrupt by rephotographing my own images, further distancing the work from myself. 

M: I strongly relate to your process and interests, both on a personal level and in my artistic practice. Your project inscribes itself into a movement of women acknowledging and addressing issues of oppression and violence by the patriarchal system of our societies that has a profound resonance in many of us. 

You mentioned silence and the consequences of that long imposed silence in our lives and identities. I recalled a book from Mary Beard called Women and Power: a Manifesto, a research on how women have been historically silenced throughout time, going back to Ancient Greek and Roman classical literature. In this sense, I find it very meaningful to revisit the work of a woman writer such as Virginia Woolf and draw inspiration and a sense of resilience from her words. 

Can you share with us your thoughts about the ways you decided to include text in the exhibition? There seems to be an ongoing dialogue between Virginia Woolf´s texts and your work, both in the form of her actual words and also recurrent motifs in her writing and your own images.

S: I’m glad you ask about my inclusion of Woolf’s text in this project.  Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is important to me, both in terms of the language she uses and as you note, the motifs that codify her main themes. Waves, trees and flowers, and time are used to explore ideas of privacy, an inward vs outward tension, oppression, invisibility, aging, and a fear of death.  I don’t believe anyone needs to be familiar with Mrs. Dalloway or even Woolf to experience and resonate with my work because I have created my own language with specific motifs and patterns to explore these overlapping themes.  

One of my intentions is to explore the intricacy of feelings associated with the oppression you mention.  Woolf addresses abuse of power throughout her career, and women today continue to confront these issues. I want to acknowledge how the patriarchal system impacts a woman emotionally. You bring up Mary Beard’s book, which outlines these systems at work far into antiquity.  I question what my role has been in perpetuating this dynamic, however imbalanced, and at what cost?  In my work, the repetition of waves and the structure of a two stranded rope speak to the ubiquity of these feelings and to the perpetuity of endurance.  

My understanding of the threads holding these systems together expanded while reading Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I, and many women I know, struggle with abuses of power and traumatic histories, yet the system of silence requires that we remain disconnected, a particularly insidious aspect that uses us against ourselves and each other. Woolf and her characters, whose thoughts often mirror my own, are a vehicle for me to investigate these ideas personally.  

In the exhibition, I include two specific pages torn from a copy of Mrs. Dalloway each pressed against the wall - seemingly held up by a framed image.  The frame itself obscures most of the writing on the page, indicating a relationship between the image it houses and whatever text on the page has been either revealed or concealed by it.  The image falls short of illustrating the text, leaving the relationship ambiguous, and open to being defined by a viewer's own narrative. Here I have taken an active role, assumed some power in dictating what can be seen, and therefore heard.  I’ve also implied a context which informs the other pieces in the show. Only a fragment of a sentence is visible,‘’...of some indescribable outrage...,’’ a statement which demands attention yet is covered by the image of a rock. The page itself is a relic of an entire history for women, a metaphor for an unseen unheard nature which survives. We can point to traumatic, life altering moments, but I align with Woolf in wanting to acknowledge the complicated inner struggles which often start much earlier and remain nuanced throughout life.   

I also engage viewers with Woolf’s text in another way, through my use of titles.  Titles in this project oscillate between key phrases pulled from Mrs. Dalloway, my own words, and the physics of waves.  When using Woolf’s text directly, as a title, I am inserting myself into a larger narrative, connecting my emotion to something metaphoric and timeless but also material and present. That is what photography can do, or at least what I want it to do.  To document something that has no form itself, record an emotional shift, or remark on the intrinsic value of a moment as part of a collective consciousness. I want to offer a glimpse of the network of feelings and implications associated with all the moments strung together. 

M: I really liked the way you described your work as being your own language, while drawing from different motifs (Woolf's and others, of course). It highlights the intertextual aspect of our practice as artists by including the gesture of bringing the references (not hiding them) into the actual exhibition. But it also refers to intertextuality as the silent and latent universe that informs our work (and decisions), the connection of our life experiences throughout time, the echoes. You put it so beautifully in your last sentence, when you say your work offers "a glimpse of the network of feelings and implications associated with all the moments strung together".

Thinking about materiality, it is rare to find "objects" in photography shows, that usually only consider the exhibition space in terms of walls and narrative sequence. I would like to ask you about the vases you included. They expand the bi-dimensionatlity of the images and contribute to create a fluctuating experience for the audience, a new outline.

S: There are more than 300 ceramic vases in the exhibition which are collectively titled “Filled, Unfilled, Unfulfilled.”  In order to view some of the photographs on the wall viewers step uncomfortably close to the vases which I’ve grouped together on the floor along the length of the gallery.  At first, the vases appear to be identical, but a closer look reveals that some are thicker or thinner, maybe shorter, slightly warped on a side, or even dented. Not one exists without its own history, despite being pulled from the same mold. They are in a fragile, bone dry state and would disintegrate in less than an hour if placed in water. They fracture if handled too aggressively. Yet together, they do, as you say, “create a new outline,” dictating the flow of movement through the space and determining the accessibility of the photographic narrative on the walls.   

Without obstructing any views, I’ve created a situation for visitors to feel an awareness of their own position in relation to the photographs, allowing for some images to be experienced more intimately than others. I’ve also used the vases to establish a recurring tension by presenting viewers with a choice...look up at an image on the wall or down at the emerging pattern of vases along the floor. Oscillating between both asks viewers to consider how the separate mediums inform one another. These delicate objects begin to influence the way viewers encounter photography, shifting power from the "viewer" back to the "viewed."  I use the vulnerability of the medium to translate and control an experience of seeing and being.

As I made each vase, I considered my own history with harassment and how prevalent this is for women. Emotional endurance is an undercurrent throughout the show. The medium of clay documents what it has endured.  It has a memory, it is impressionable but resilient, and importantly, it is capable of transformation.  The medium itself cannot conceal the imprint of its own experiences. In other words, each vase is the physical representation of what it has already endured, but each vase can continue to change. I’ve mentioned their vulnerability in a bone dry state, but each can also withstand unimaginable forces of heat, over and over again, only to become stronger and more impervious each time. This potential for vulnerability to double as strength is present in each vase.  

Vases are traditionally associated with ornamentation and decoration. The vase I use in several of the photographs is a simple bulb shape topped with a narrow neck. One photograph titled “Container for Rapture,” (words borrowed from Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway), shows the vase nearly empty with just a single unspecified stem. The head of the flower has been cropped out leaving the vase itself as the subject. The ambiguity of this still life reflects my personal struggle to understand how societal norms and power structures have challenged the relationship between my public and private self, and interrupted the transformation of my vulnerability into strength. 

There are emotional ramifications of restrictive gender norms which, back to Mary Beard, are steeped in a long history of patriarchy.  The casualty is self worth. A system of silence is made stronger by instilling feelings of powerlessness, self doubt, and isolation. The complicated and multifarious levers involved with a culture rooted in oppression can make it difficult to identify on the surface.  At some point, in some moments, the struggle to exist outside this reductive framework becomes clear.   

I can’t help but think of the speech Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered just this week on the floor of the US House of Representatives in response to being called a “fucking bitch” by fellow Congressman Yoho (who was not alone when he verbally assaulted her). In AOC’s response, she doesn't yield her outrage like a weapon. Instead, she is measured, prepared, and intentional. She shares her vulnerability, and declares her strength because of it. She was not addressing Yoho directly, but rather the long and antiquated patriarchy in a society whose silence continues to allow for these moments.  

Back to the vases, together, they form the shape of a wave undulating in and out from the gallery wall. There is a sense that, as a wave, they are part of a larger space and time, and like waves, there are many more to consider than what is visible in the moment. Waves also appear in my photographs, metaphorically, as different energetic states of the same view of Lake Michigan, pleats in a skirt rippling around the legs of a young girl twirling in a garden, the contour of a woman’s body reclining like a wave, or the repetitive weave of a rope cycling around itself perpetually. A rhythm is shared between the sculptural elements and the photographs. The vases touch and connect on the floor interrupting the monotony of the pattern. As they lean in on one another the overall structure of the arrangement becomes more stable. 

Waves cycle through water, gaining power, flowing into one another, impacting each other and responding together to  forces in and around the water. Systemic silencing is a repetitive pattern women have shared over time. I’ve come to recognize the individual power I have for transformation and liberation, but as a woman I also have the power and responsibility to amplify other women’s voices. The photographic narrative on the walls documents my own process for finding voice, but the collection of vases on the floor suggests the surfacing of my desire to continue the conversation beyond my own healing.  

M: As you mentioned, I too relate the vases –its physical presence in the gallery– to our bodies. I see community, resilience and, above all, strength through the sum of singularities.

One thing I really appreciate about your work is that you are saying something –we can hear it coming in echoes through the waves, in the tensioning of ropes, in the gestures of the hand venturing, trying to reach afar– yet at the same time you are opening possibilities, moving away from certainties and embracing vulnerability as strength. It feels like an ongoing attempt to name a reality while, in doing so, acknowledging and exploring the possibilities of this new language.

Collage is a recurring strategy in your work, creating images that open themselves into a wide space of meaning. I would love to hear about how you approach image making.

Abuse of power and misogyny create disturbance, interference, and interruption which I interpret visually in many of my images. Turmoil within the waves, a rope bisecting a natural garden, a bouquet of roses torn and pieced back together over domestic wallpaper. These images document the vulnerability associated with these interruptions and refer to a presence that endures over time. They also carry a related undercurrent of tension between the possibilities of ambition and the recoil of regret. I want to create a sense of reassembling oneself in order to move forward. Collage is a method I use to create a snapshot of this contemplative consciousness. I don't appropriate images to tell a different story. Instead, I use parts of my own images to demonstrate how over time, the mind shuffles personal details and recontextualizes feelings. The story we tell ourselves is capable of change. Combining my images this way gives me a sense of control. I am emotionally restructuring moments that previously felt powerless. Moving away from passive voice, collage is a practice of making active choices. The combinations of images I assemble are deliberate. I’m not playing with chance. I am using collage to communicate a multitude of possibilities for being.  

I use my camera to document these collages. As a tool, the camera creates distance between the emotional attachments I’ve mixed together and layers of time which I reassemble into new compositions. Some of my images initially appear flat and graphic, but with a closer look they become hyper-dimensional, almost sculptural. This subtle trompe l'oeil effect intentionally blurs the distinction between truth and fiction. Memory, as a form of consciousness, continuously reinterprets thoughts and feelings. A struggle between inner needs and outer behavior repeats. The need for privacy, for example, is perpetually at odds with a longing for connection. I don’t always cut my work to make collages. In one case I wrap an entire print in plastic before I rephotograph it. In another, I photograph my computer screen while processing an image I’ve already printed and rephotographed several times, suggesting   contemplation and manipulation are part of the image’s subject. I’m intentionally denigrating the “value of images” as an act of quiet rebellion against the preciousness and the expectations of a historically male dominated and formulaic field of photography. 

We've talked about the intertextual nature of this project and the importance of my connection to both Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway.  The images I’ve constructed annotate how my own life experience parallels the feelings she describes and connects me to women over time. On the last page of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf writes, ‘“...she must assemble,’” which pinpoints the transformative process I am trying to convey with my image making. Virginia Woolf ultimately commits suicide after a lifetime haunted by trauma and loss. I feel compelled to make space for conversations about the difficult emotional struggles women continue to endure. I find it outrageous that the word endurance is so inextricably attached to my perspective of being a woman.