POLAROID AS A MEDIUM | Beth Jonquil

My work is a three part Polaroid process.

1st – I compose the photograph. The film gives me my image and color pallet, in emulsion form.

2nd – I employ a painterly/etching technique to actually move and carve new lines into the image and blend the colored emulsion. This is all done plein air. I sit down right then and there and physically work on the picture. I have approximately 2 to 4 hours to affect the 3×3 inch Polaroid image.

3rd – As instant film is not archival, I scan and clean my picture, then create a huge digital file. This enables it to be made into an archival print, with perfect clarity, using giclee ink on archival watercolor or photo paper in any size, from three inches to six feet big!

I have always felt a sense of story and other worldliness in my art. I have an impressionistic and classical, perhaps slightly fantastic, orientation. I enjoy visually enhancing an image or an idea, expanding our ways of seeing or thinking. My goal would be to offer a heightened sense of beauty and an increased awareness of elemental connectedness, as things merge with other things and lines do not separate so much as connect. This applies to the actual physical representation of the images as well as to the ideas and memories revealed that connect us to our past and present.

Yes! There is a company called ‘the Impossible Project’ that is currently recreating the Polaroid films. So I have access to their new films to continue working in my medium.