Bollinger – Creature Comfort

I feel as though I've really been having a battle with my senior project with what it is and what I want it to be. I thought more about the "cathartic" meaning behind my own personal walks and tried to find a better way of connecting that sensation to what I previously had been observing in other people. It has been a real challenge for me to try to formulate the emotion I felt while conducting those studies, and coming to terms with it. I am not a very personal person, I have never really "aired out" my emotions and constantly being asked "well what does it mean" or "what do you hope to achieve through making this" was daunting to me because I still hadn't (and maybe still haven't) figured it completely out, I just had a natural attraction to collect that kind of data.

The project title I've currently decided on is Creature Comfort; the phrase means- material comforts that contribute to physical ease and well-being, such as good food and accommodations. It's the things that make living just a little more tolerable, it's the coffee shop, the peacefulness of a library, the energy of a public event, it's the walks. It can encompasses a cathartic type of experience too, but it's more than that. It's the human experience.

I feel as though in my maps, studies, and journalings I have always taken the backseat as an observer in this world. That is also reflected in my photographs; particularly the ones of the lights cast from peoples homes. I use the emptiness of the streets to my advantage to frame the shot, and a single room illuminated in the darkness and inside the frame of someone's life. Just a second of it, or however it long it takes me to walk past it. An acknowledgment and I pass. There's even personality to the quality of light or the kinds of drapes, I wonder what kind of person lives there. What does candle light mean? Or dainty laced drapes, does someones grandparents live there? I desire to get close, but not too close. It's lonely, I admit, but I'm not trying to be self-pitying (that's also something else I've been trying to combat), it's more of just questioning and reflective.