stain [stephanie kong]
|CURATOR'S NOTE|
Our second contributor of eclipse-themed work is Stephanie Kong. Stephanie is a writer and photographer in Atlanta, GA, and co-director of Humble Telescopes. We are grateful to her for the following videos, photo, and poem.
In “hole,” a hole is burned into a canvas. It feels unpredictable and a little frightening. And then the video reverses: the flame turns back, the smoke is inhaled, the canvas becomes whole again. It should be impossible – it should be unscrambling an egg. In “flicker” and “shadow,” she becomes playful, like a universe pleased with her power and no longer afraid.
We asked Stephanie to speak about her work for fLoromancy. Here’s what she had to say:
[On her process]
I wanted to play with light – you know, because the solar eclipse is shadows – and fire made sense. Fire is violent, full of magic and mysticism. Similar to my monthly uterine sheddings.
And that perspective relates to the poem. Plus I am a pyro. So I stunk up my kitchen burning canvas. I filmed it on my phone and then edited in reverse to mimic the solar eclipse.
I played around with the canvas. I noticed the fire wasn’t entirely out. The edges were still burning, and I loved the flickers of the tiny rage. I used a candle to paint on another canvas in a rhythmic rotation. I placed the canvas with the hole over the flamed painting to see how they would interact with each other. The dark image was taken outside and the blip of light in the middle is the full moon.
So really one action led to the next without a real plan in place. It was fun and stinky.
[On her eclipse experience]
My solar eclipse experience was surprisingly without tears, but that may have been replaced with the fact I was more bashful about blood bleeding down as the sun started its path of totality. Once I got over feeling, I let all the other feelings come. As cheesy as it sounds, I felt connected to the earth in an extremely powerful way. Like we were having a one-on-one conversation in a crowd of people. It was quite special.
With gratitude,
Jess Bernhart and Scott Collison
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