Emily Gordon

It took me a while to grasp the whole nut concept but I started thinking about which drawings I put up for midterm critique and how the whole theme of water and flooding pertains very personally to my beginning experience in Florence. The first concept that I’d like to explore is aftermath. This refers to the image of the water on the ground after the flood. I started to think about what happens after the flood? What is left? Is it problematic or is there relief that it is over? Next I started to explore the idea of control. How can I prevent the overflow and flooding of water? Is it beyond my control?

In my meeting with Julia, we talked a lot about whether it was important what the liquid is that was overflowing, or if what I am drawing is something found or set up. I realized that I really like the photographs that I created in the first half of the semester as source material and I decided that I want to produce a combination of photographs and drawings, to play around and see what fits the concept best. Julia pointed out that I should be careful about the objects and where I photograph them and the choices I make in general. Also in her slide show, she showed me two photographs of people who had submerged parts of their bodies in water which gave me the idea that I could also use myself to represent my ideas because depicting the fountain basin is not as important to me anymore. Then my two ideas kind of morphed together into a progression of flooding, from the overflowing (lack of control) to an attempt at control, to the aftermath and finally to being ok. I’ve been thinking about a lot of ways to express these nuts but the first thing I came up with (an decided to execute immediately) was to photograph my hand expressing these stages (the pictures of this are posted). I’m working on other ways to show the aftermath of flooding. I might continue to work on my watercolor drawings as well and see what happens if I try to separate the nuts, because that might lead in an interesting direction as well.