The Sky is Blue: beginnings- endings- becoming

The sky is blue. The sky is blue. The sky is blue.

My thoughts staring upwards as my husband told me he cheated on me, the sky is blue.

The Sky is Blue is a photographic memoir documenting my accidental archive of beginnings, endings and becoming. I knew I had to make work about my life falling apart together I just didn’t quite know where to begin. Turns out I already made it collecting meaningful images, objects and mementos over the last 24 years.

My collection practices have been with me since I was a child and continue to this day. Maybe it’s not too surprising then that I discovered a beginning for this project in the things teenage Michele kept while falling for her first love. I did not know then that he would become my husband, the father of my daughter and heartbreakingly my ex-husband too. Since I ended my marriage I have explored the glories and agonies of single motherhood, chopped the tip of my finger off with an axe and endured traumas working in healthcare during the pandemic. What I initially thought was a story about us was actually a more fascinating story about me; so many selves represented here.

Over the years I’ve built strategies into my art practice which force me to get out of my head. I hide my work from myself long enough to let go of the unresolved or obsessive issues I encountered while creating it. Forgetfulness is required. Forgetting becomes remembering with new eyes. The interplay between the accuracy of facts and the gaps inherent in memory is where the magic happens. It is also where Photography’s philosophically flawed documentary ways perfectly align. The records we make and the records we keep are always much more than they appear to be, part fact part fiction and all true.

My impulse to keep special things in my youth became an extended self portrait, a long exposure as if I left the shutter open creating a time lapse of a story writing itself, a story of becoming.

This is an ongoing project. Further mining of the archive continues.

The “Becoming” Triptychs emerged first. Additional pieces will be added as they are completed.

Link to my Artist Talk introducing this body of work as part of The Center for Fine Art Photography's exhibition, Center Forward 2023.