Leah Caroline
My works are journals of personal and communal tellings. Specifically, “I have come to my garden” is a series of scrolled nature journals of my garden, Song of Songs, plant life cycles, and my pregnant self. I make the scrolls with cyanotypes, an early photographic printing process used to record nature and make blueprints. To make the negatives for the prints, I digitally manipulate photographs of nature, personal writings, and Biblical and other communal texts. I arrange and layer the negatives onto chemically sensitized papers, expose them to sunlight, and process in water. The processed papers turn a brilliant Prussian blue. This collaboration with the essentials of nature reflect my inspiration for my work, which is nature itself. I once wrote about an aloe plant in my nature journal, where it signified my pregnant self. When the plant died, I photographed its strange dried forms. These images became kinds of letters that form the language of my work. I honor this relationship with nature in my installation work where I create Wunderkammern with the photographs of dried aloe and shofars; as well as the actual plants and taxidermy that were used to make the photographs, scrolls, and cyanotypes. I present the scrolls with their sources as a community, and they tell new stories.
