Headspace

Head Space
2006
Rebecca Strain
Photography

Head Space- a place to go to where you can be left alone with your own thoughts. Made from a remnant of cotton/linen material found at the bottom of a basket, bought just to save it from being left there, and paper pulp made from a few Big Issue magazines bought over the weeks to save a person or two from complete despair.
I slowly rip the pages into squares deconstructing the message and returning it to a collection of words on coloured paper.
The squares of torn paper are then submerged in warm water and for a few days until the print is diluted and starts to come away from the paper. I take the clean dry sheet of white material out of the paper bag and lower it into the vat of grey water and pulp. The change begins.
I raise it out of the liquid. I hook the sheet on two nails on the wall. It hangs dripping. I lift out some pulp from the vat and thrown it at the hanging sheet. I throw all of the paper pulp at it. I get an old bottle of black poster paint and pour it down it’s front.
It hangs there in my studio like a portal for negativity. I am aware of it slowly soaking up all the moisture, fusing the material, paper pulp and paint.
The material is now discoloured and rigid, the magazine is now illegible and its fibres agitated, the paint is now just darkness.
I join the bottom to the top with panel pins to create a cylindrical form, hollow with and inside and an outside. I have created a space. A headspace, a breathing space, and a space where I cannot see anything that is around me, but my own breasts and hands and legs and feet, inside a form that has become resistant to negativity.