If you haven’t heard, this is the second time this project, which is for people with CFS/ME (PWCFS/ME) has run. If you follow the link above you can look through the first edition which was published through the print-on-demand service issuu.
And below is a video of Kirrliy Anderson who initiated the whole project. She is speaking at the launch of the tour which the first project made.
To keep the project rolling along, once the journal is in your hands you can only keep it for two weeks. In order to work quickly and also because I wanted to make something that was “recognisable” as my work, I decided to dig into what I call my “collage box”. This is where I keep test prints from previous works, a stash of Japanese papers and a few very select pieces of ephemera I’ve collected.
I began by physically putting different imagery together and when I had made a selection, I moved onto the computer which allowed me to work with the same imagery but to alter the scale and translucency.
I was aiming to make work that spoke about the experience of living with CFS, without being blatant and in a way which incorporated both the loss and grief, as well as the hope and potential. Below are the results.
%5B2%5D.jpg "Watson-Will: Hope")
I really enjoyed this process and found that there is a lot more work to be done with the imagery that I’ve developed in the past. It was very satisfying to bring together some of the work I did for my masters with more recent work. It also seems that this is a productive and effective way to work when I am quite low on energy.
There’s quite a lot that I could say about the imagery, connections that I can see and interpretations that could be made, but I think I’ll let the work speak for itself.
