I can’t believe this week has been the fourth week I’ve been doing my Artist Residency in Motherhood. If you want to catch up on what I’ve been making visit my blog.

This week has been going by so quickly, and I almost feel like I have nothing to show for it. The sun is finally shining again here in San Diego so that does make me feel a little better mentally about making work and being motivated. I was beginning to lose it near the end of last week.

Something that changed. I got some critiques on my work for the first round of Artist/Mother critique group.

Here’s what I decided on putting into my first round of this critique group.

It has been so nice to see initial reactions of the work I’ve been trying to make the last few weeks with cyanotypes, and work I’ve been building the last few months with the introduction of my home developing space. There were a lot of questions for me and the work that I’ll need to address moving forward, and I’m excited to see how these ideas develop after the feedback i received.

I’ve really been wanting to capture our daily life more and incorporate more consistent film shooting into my practice again. The addition of the cyanotypes has been a great way for me to explore a different, more involved process and what that means when the subject is toys and other small objects my daughter has left on the floor. I’m excited about the directions I can go with this work, and will share more of that process soon.

Here’s how the rest of the week went…

On monday I attempted to take some self portraits while my daughter napped. MY CAMERA BROKE. Now, a week or so ago the autofocus feature stopped working, so I figured I couldn’t still manage, yet it started doing some pretty strange things when I would even try to take a photo, and I got a couple very blurry, but maybe usable for something portraits.

Instead of sulking about all of my broken polaroid cameras, I picked up my medium format camera wednesday, read the manual (whoa I learned some valuable things that made shooting a lot easier). And took a few self portraits with my daughter and quite a few of her playing around the yard. I finished up the entire roll of film, including a couple family portraits. And was able to develop the roll that night. Making it the first time I’ve ever shot and developed a roll in the same day, something I’ve really wanted to achieve with my workflow and home developing.

The following day I took some time for much needed rest and scanned the two rolls I developed. Here are some favorites I took that day.

I’m so much happier with what I’ve been able to achieve with my work and will be making more intentional images now that I’ve gotten the technical side of shooting with my medium format down, as well as developing my film at home.

Next week I hope to continue making medium format portraits, and hopefully polaroids with another camera I have, as well as document a lot more objects for the ongoing cyanotype work now that I’ve received more feedback. I’d also like to share more of my though process and themes I’m exploring in the work more, rather than just having an ongoing documentation of what I made. This may mean shorter, more frequent blog posts instead of a weekly log. Or just focusing on talking about one medium in depth.

I hope to pursue more funding opportunities for my residency as well, as right now I’ve been limited to using the materials I have on hand. There are a few opportunities I hope to apply to in the coming months.

If you would like to support my Artist Residency in Motherhood,consider becoming a Patron. Through the generosity of my patrons each month, I am able to pay for this website, or purchase film to make more work.

If monthly subscriptions aren’t your style. You can buy prints polaroids and more on this site. Use the code SPRING15 for 15% off your order.