Water Lily Card

water lily card: front, (blank inside), back

I often go for walks down to Keller Lake. Sometimes I bring my camera with a project in mind and sometimes I just take photographs for pleasure. I took this water lily photograph on 7/15 and shortly after thought of it when I wanted to send a sympathy card to a relative who'd lost his mother. I'd thought before of exploring cards as a type of work for Full Spring Studio (FSS) and decided I would try it with this one and put the studio name on it. While I liked the photograph, I wasn't sure if FSS should expand into straight nature photography. The FSS mission is to explore stories of connection and flow, and I'm particularly interested in interpreting infrastructure as a way to reveal interconnecting systems. So a flower card seemed a weak link to the body of work - until I thought of expanding the card to include a poem about interconnection. With the poem, the card was more like my artist's books, merging image with a story line. It is still just a greeting card, but now it does some work toward the mission. The flower - so easy to see and name as an object - is recast in the poem as part of a larger organism and process. While that interconnection is described with poetic license, it remains true to the actual interconnectedness of the flower with its stem and roots in the dark silt below. I like it best as a sympathy card, but I've also used it as a card for other purposes. I'm not sure whether I'll add cards to my work publicly, but I'll continue to explore this form. It interests me to think of a card as a small, interactive artist's book. There's the cover, what is written inside, and a post-script on the back. How does the inner message, relate to the card's story? How does the story in the the image and poem of the card affect how the inner writing is perceived?