Blue Moon Garden
The situation we found ourselves in at the beginning of 2020 was a time of trial that we faced in a various ways. In my case, this difficult period resulted in a strong longing for open space and contact with nature. The limitations we faced every day also influenced what, how and why I create. For me the seclusion was a time of reflection and an opportunity to look anew into my archives of negatives.
Blue Moon Garden has become a land where imagination, longing and experience meet. I traveled there every day, creating collages full of allegories from negatives and prints of plants I found. The choice of cyanotype was not accidental.
In this technique, a unique monochrome image in the color of Prussian blue is created directly on the pa- per manually coated with a photosensitive substance. Originally, I lit the works in my studio under a spe- cial lamp which imitates daylight. As soon as the restrictions were eased down, I started to expose them directly to the sun. It is the sun that gives the works the depth of color, and leaving the darkroom has be- come symbolic for me. The days of isolation changed the pace of darkroom preparations and a day full of creative work in the sunshine. My perception has also changed. Vegetation without man seemed to breathe, gain strength and be more lush, fuller than ever before. Every leaf, blade of grass, new bud screamed – look how beautiful I am, how important and how special!
The Blue Moon is the term used in astronomy for the very rare second full moon in a month. It symbol- izes the moment of summing up and materializing what has developed over the past months. Blue also embodies melancholy as we become more and more lonely, detached from reality that changes much faster than our beliefs and habits. Less and less we see beauty in us, in nature, in the process of changes, in the subtleties of the seasons of the year. Perhaps we will find the antidote in ourselves as soon as we allow a balance between the expansion of the external world and the silence of the inner world.
