It struck me that in my digital afterlife I will not be the one manipulating or appropriating my images. In order to experience what this might mean I asked Catherine, a fellow OCA student and my co-curator on the ‘Time’ exhibition, if she might consider responding to my work.
I asked her to work with the five digital decollage images as they had been shared via social media and were therefore in the public domain and open to use by others. I suggested a completely open brief, in that she could do whatever she liked with them and I am incredibly grateful that she agreed to give it a go. I was a bit concerned that this was might be an imposition but Catherine was equally interested in experimenting and seeing what the outcome might be. We agreed a deadline of the end of March 2019.
During March there was a Thames Valley Group meeting and I was lucky to get a sneak preview of some of what Catherine had been working on. She talked about picking up on the material and digital aspects of the project and how she had felt compelled to create objects. She made two beautiful origami boxes and someone in the group joked we could put my ashes in them! Catherine also shared several prints she had made on different textured papers and a piece she had printed on fabric.
I was asked how it felt to see what someone else had done with my images and it was a powerful question to reflect on. I genuinely felt very at ease with it, I think I had spent so much time pondering my digital afterlife that I was very open to just letting the images go and accepting that someone would do something very different with them. Had the images been taken without my permission I may have felt differently about it but that is something to ponder further.
Catherine and I met just after the project deadline and she talked me through her process and the final outcomes. It was incredibly exciting to see her work as I had no sense of what else she might have done. She brought them in a portfolio box and it felt magical as she brought out each of the pieces.
I was very pleased, and a little relieved, to hear that Catherine had found the process helpful for her own work. It was also good to know that the timing had worked for her too, we both felt a little flat after all the excitement of the ‘Time’ exhibition, so this gave us something else to think about.
Prints 1 
Prints 2 
Textile print
Catherine described how she started by working with paper and textures, but she was ultimately looking for something more tactile. This took her on to a textile piece, where she created a mirrored version of one of the images and had it printed on some satin type cloth. I like its fluid nature and you could literally let the image fall through your fingers. She also talked about picking images from the set I had sent that were the most vivid and vibrant. She was very pleased with the outcome and felt it had inspired her coursework.
Boxes 
Boxes and fabric 
Fern Polaroids
After the fabric Catherine moved on to Polaroids and made the beautiful origami boxes. She explained to me ‘I got hooked on ferns and roses, like I was wanting to bring them back to life.’ I found this fascinating and hadn’t really thought this might be an outcome, I think I had been so focused on the possible destruction of the work that the potential of reconstruction hadn’t occurred to me. This led to two beautiful Polaroids which I think have an amazing ethereal quality, they reminded my of some of the Victorian spirit photographs I had looked at last year.
Lumen print series 
Lumen print
Working further on the roses and ferns Catherine then created some lumen prints, nine small and one large. They too have a delicate and impermanent feel. This is deepened by the fact that they have not been permanently fixed because that fades the tones. They now live in their black protective envelopes, destined to fade away if they are brought into the light for too long, a perfect metaphor for my project!
She then decided to focus on the rose, and created a painted stone, of a single rose, that became a rose tree. As a result of trying to sketch the intricacies of a rose Catherine has been working more in her in sketchbooks and signed up to The Great Sketchbook Revival.
Fern cyanotype 
Rose cyanotype
The final pieces were fern and rose cyanotypes, the fern is said to have magical properties and symbolises eternal youth and hope for future generations, which again seems fitting for the focus of my work.
It was really thought provoking to see what Catherine had created as I don’t think either of us had any preconceptions. She said she had thought about collage but preferred to work by deconstructing and looking at the elements.
This wok has fired her desire to do more than what we both refer to as ‘straight’ photography, something that really chimes with me and I suspect may be why I asked Catherine to collaborate in the first place
As well as the outcomes we talked more about the process and how we both had a tendency towards ‘reflection in action’ as well as ‘on action.’ Again, this may be why we have both become more experimental and been drawn towards materiality and sketchbooks. Places we can be ‘seriously playful.’
Catherine has posted her own thoughts on her Learning Log. https://catherinebankslnd.wordpress.com/category/workshops-and-meetings/other/collaborations/