Farthest North - Gwen Walstrand

Written By Susan Patrice
 
 
 
 

Farthest North

Gwen Walstrand

 

My fictional and fragmented images, made from camera-less chemigrams and collaged snippets from my own photographs, attempt to slice through history, space, galaxies, and reconfigure our understanding of our position in the world as both precarious and hopeful.

This ancient rock on which we reside offers a context for reveling in uncertainty and peering into the vastness of incomprehensible things. I am a skeptic, but I search for the sacred, somehow attached to the ancient and adjacent to the wisdom of the natural world. The rocks, skies, caverns, and stars offer limitless possibilities for wandering among the unknown and clasping the occasional slippery fragment of sacred, ancient knowledge.

How will we retain fragile hope in a world spinning in an orbit of waste and confusion? How do we navigate the unknown with respect and care instead of destruction? These images explore the precarity and insignificance of our existence while promoting the spirit of our imaginations and insistent hope.

 

Gwen Walstrand is a Springfield, Missouri-based artist and Professor of Photography at Missouri State University. Gwen has exhibited and presented her visual work in national and international venues, including Italy, Finland, Spain, Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, and throughout the United States. Her work has been published in Orion Magazine-Nature/Culture/Place and in two editions of Christopher James’ Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, in Black and White Magazine, Loosen Art Magazine, Sieties, and FotoNoviembre’s Atlántica Colectivas.

Susan Patrice

As the founder and director of Makers Circle, Susan Patrice designs and implements arts-informed community initiatives in partnership with non-arts organizations who want to expand their reach and impact through innovative cross-sector collaboration. Makers Circle has a deep passion for the power of the creative process to encourage adaptive change, expand awareness, and open up new ways of seeing and relating. We believe that the arts and artists should play a major role in community regeneration and non-profit advancement. Web design and digital storytelling are foundational to the work we do with non-profits.

https://kinship.photography/
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