Participants in this panel have a scattered assortment of fragments of the medieval past to sort through. The tide has washed some of this flotsam and jetsam in to the site at Omeka, where shell collectors, treasure-hunters, and those just out for a stroll will find it littering the beach. They might pick some things up, sort them into displays, use them in making sandcastles or words scratched out with a stick, take them home, or throw them back. They might leave some of the things they brought with them behind--as a present to the sea or as unwanted junk.Participants in the panel worked (mostly) with the "flotsam and jetsam" collection of objects that Lara had assembled in the Omeka site cited above to create online exhibits. Because of some technical difficulties, though, most of our work ended up at a second Omeka site provided by Hyperrhiz. My exhibit is the one entitled "Sand, Sea, Sky" and the underlying collections are primarily Lara's original "Low Tide" and the additional items I added in "Shells and Badges." Below is the text thaat I presented as part of the conference panel.
In creating my final, finished,
exhibit for this project I decided to begin by taking Lara’s metaphor of
beachcombing as seriously as possible and this meant working rather
intuitively; because in my experience of beachcombing I typically collect
things without a clear intention or motivation or outcome in mind. Instead I pick up whatever appeals to me, for
whatever reason, and without much reflection on those reasons. And so I picked one item from our collective “shore”
collection each day over six days, picking whatever appealed to me on that
particular day, and creating a page in the exhibit for it. However, in this case I did take a next step
of reflecting in writing on why I picked that particular item, on what specific
appeal it had for me: this writing forms the first paragraph on each page in
the exhibit itself. And the title of
each page names its item’s specific appeal: Making, Difficulty, In/Complete,
Wearing/Being, Intimacy, and Energy.
To stay as close as possible to the
beachcombing metaphor, I then chose to pair the items that I had selected for
the exhibit with a number of actual beachcombed objects, stones and shells that
I had gathered on a trip to the Oregon coast several years ago. I picked a stone or shell to pair with each
item in the exhibit by trying to match the specific appeal that I had
identified for that item with a similar quality in the beachcombed object: my
reflections on that match form the second paragraph on each exhibit page. Then I pressed the metaphor of beachcombing in
the direction that Lara had set for us as a way of thinking about our relationships
to the past. I considered how the
specific appeal I had identified for each exhibit item, the quality that I had then
identified for the shell or stone, might also appear in relationships to the
past; sometimes thinking specifically about my own work on medieval art and
sometimes more broadly. This work forms
the third and last paragraph on each exhibit page.
Finally, for some reason, after
that trip to the Oregon coast, I had assembled my beachcombed stones and shells
into a landscape and photographed it: this is the image that appears on the
Introduction page for the exhibit. I
decided to allow this image to dictate the structure of the final exhibit,
taking the location of each beachcombed shell or stone in the landscape as
determining its page’s place in the exhibit as a whole. And this also then established the sections
for the exhibit and their order, moving from foreground to background as Sand,
Sea, and Sky.
Rather than talking through the
exhibit further at this point, because you can of course look at it for
yourselves – and I hope that you will – I instead want to take some time to
reflect on my process of putting it together.
I will admit that this was a difficult project for me to work on: I put
off getting started on it and I had several false starts before I finally came
up with what I have here. The issue was
that I initially wanted to have a clear idea of what the outcome of my work,
the final exhibit, was going to look like before I started to do any work on
it. And I didn’t have an idea so I
didn’t get started. And then I had a
couple of ideas, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, and so I would get
started on something sort of half-heartedly and then would give up on it and
delete what I had done. This has a lot
to do with my tendencies towards anxiety and depression. The uncertainty of not-knowing what the final
outcome of something is going to be can make me very anxious and then can get
in the way of me doing it at all.
Especially since I tend to try to jump ahead and imagine an outcome, but
I often imagine negative outcomes, and that further discourages me from doing
the work. I don’t imagine that these are
unique feelings, my understanding is that they are actually pretty typical of
structures of anxiety and depression, and I’m sure I’m not the only person here
who struggles with those issues.
The key for me in finally getting
past all of that for this project was shifting my attention from the end
product to the process that I was engaged in. And this is where I really found Lara’s
beachcombing metaphor to be helpful; because when I think of beachcombing it’s
typically a process that doesn’t have an end product. On this trip to the Oregon coast, for
example, my sister-in-law was also picking things up on the beach but I believe
she left all of hers behind because she didn’t really know what she would do
with them. I brought my objects back to
Cleveland with me and made this photograph with them, but then they ended up in
this container of rocks that I use for drainage for potted plants, and I had to
dig them out for this project. The
experience of working on the project, then, has me thinking about the tension
between product and process; about our tendency to over-value product and
devalue process, which has to do with these mental structures, but I think is
also exacerbated by our current working environment and the pressure we all
feel to be productive in order to prove our worth to our institutions as well
as ourselves; and finally it has me thinking about ways of resisting that
tendency and coming to value process itself.
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