Interview: Megan Bent on her practice and “I Don’t Want to Paint a Silver Lining Around It”
Quarantine Day 7, 2020, Chlorophyll print on hydrangea leaf, 10x10",
Image description: A round brown hydrangea leaf on a black background. Printed in the light umber chlorophyll is a self-portrait where half my face is lit by the sun and my head and eyes are tilted upward.
Tell us about the project.
I started working on, I Don’t Want To Paint A Silver Lining Around It during the pandemic. In another ongoing project, Latency, I had already been using the chlorophyll printing process (which uses UV light to print images onto leaves) to explore Disability as Culture and Identity. But the experience of the pandemic, while related to the work in Latency, felt like it needed to be its own chapter.
Quarantine Day 121, 2020, Chlorophyll print on hosta leaf, 10x10"
Image Description: A teardrop-shaped hosta leaf on a black background. Printed in the chlorophyll is a self-portrait while wearing a face mask. My face takes up the whole leaf and only one eye is visible through overgrown sweeping hair. The face mask is decorated with vine and leaf patterns.
Since the spring of 2020, I have been documenting the experience of being chronically ill and immunosuppressed during the pandemic. And the experience of the outside world demanding that people like me be acceptable losses for personal convenience or for corporate profit.
The printed images illustrate the prolonged solitude of a year plus in lockdown. The text stamped directly into the leaves conveys the dialogue between the administrative & public messaging to the Disability Community and my private thoughts and responses.
Chlorophyll printing (where one print/exposure may take anywhere from 8- 72 hours) relies on flexibility, interdependence with nature, and echoes my experience of Crip Time, living in a body/mind that values slowing down, connection, and care over speed and production.
The action of printing representations of disability onto leaves highlights the organic nature of disability, reframing it as a part of human diversity. Printing my medical imagery is a reclamation of my medicalized body. I create these images with love and care, and in the process, the parts of me that are seen as deficient in the medical world are transformed into living temporal pieces of beauty. The fact that chlorophyll prints are impermanent, and will continue to decay over time, asks the viewer to confront the interdependence and bodily impermanence we all share.
Isolation Walk #01, 2020, Chlorophyll print on coleus leaf, 10x10"
Image description: A golden and pink coleus leaf on a black background. Printed in the chlorophyll in dark green is my shadow while walking. On the bottom, left-hand side of the frame is my hand holding a cane.
What is your process like?
Since the Spring of 2020, I have been taking pictures that record the daily experience of being chronically ill during the pandemic. The images I take are pretty banal; me at home, resting, going to the doctors, in treatment, the seasons changing, going for walks. I felt like the images needed to match my existence and not dramatize or sugarcoat it. I select images from this ongoing archive that I want to chlorophyll print and have them transferred onto transparency film.
During bright sunny days, I pair the imagery I have taken (printed on transparency film) with leaves inside a contact printing frame. I put the frame out in the sun to expose and after a day or two of exposure, I see what happened. It is a process that requires curiosity. Sometimes I am excited and happy about the result and other times the exposure or the way the print lays on the leaf is not quite right and I just keep experimenting and trying until the leaf and print have a symbiosis.
One print/exposure may take anywhere from 8- 72 hours and throughout the day I will check on the print and continue to move it to keep it in the sun's path. Theorist and author Alison Kafer says “Crip Time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires re-imagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of 'how long things take' are based on very particular minds and bodies. Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, Crip Time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”
It is really important to me that I work in a photographic process that echoes my experience of Crip Time, interdependence, and care - all values of the Disability Community that have become even more important this past year.
Taking Up Space (Internal Rebuttal), 2020, text stamped into maple leaves, 14x11”
Image description: Three red maple leaves on a black background. Stamped into them are the words "I have been sick and in pain every day for fifteen years. I am anything but weak."
Untitled (180,000 lost and counting) August 26, 2020, chlorophyll print on hosta leaf
Image Description: A heart-shaped hosta leaf on a black background. Printed in the chlorophyll is an empty hospital bed lit by the natural light of a nearby window.
Does mental health or wellness factor into the creation of your work?
Absolutely, first and foremost Mental Health/Mental Illness falls under the Disability umbrella. Whether someone wants to claim Disability is their own personal decision but the Disability community is inclusive of mental health.
Personally, I live with generalized anxiety along with autoimmune diseases. The experience of the pandemic along with the barrage of blatant ableism has definitely affected me and created trauma that I am processing through this work.
I have been following the Too Tired Project for a while and I am very honored to share my work on this platform. I think it is really important to de-stigmatize illness and mental health. I love how Too Tired Project is creating space for that.
How did you begin this project?
I had been chlorophyll printing since 2015, and chlorophyll printing disability imagery since 2017. When the pandemic started I was too overwhelmed to make anything but was taking pictures with my phone of daily life in lockdown. I started chlorophyll printing in late June of 2020 and had to pause printing in November due to a lack of UV light. I have recently started chlorophyll printing again and imagine I will be printing this work into the fall of 2021.
I felt compelled to make this work because I was so upset and disturbed by the ableism that became more prominent during the pandemic. The pandemic started with reassurances that “only the sick and elderly will die”, followed by calls to “sacrifice the weak”, the rationing of care based on ableist assumptions about the quality of life, anti-maskers trying to co-opt the ADA to go mask-less, the de-prioritization of high-risk communities for vaccines, and…Well I could go on and on but needless to say it has been a lot. Making work, images, art is my way to speak out and process, so I will continue to do that.
OutPatient, 2021, Chlorophyll print on spotted begonia, 10x10"
Image description: A vertical spotted begonia leaf with hues of yellow, green, and a little pink on a black background. Printed in the chlorophyll is a hospital waiting room with large letters spelling “OUTPATIENT” just outside the window.
Pandemic Eugenics II, 2020, text stamped into maple leaf, 10x10”
Image description: A bright orange maple leaf on a black background with the phrase "Sacrifice the Weak" stamped into it. Quote from April 2020 Re-open the Country protests.
Was the process of creating this project helpful for dealing with the emotion you're describing in your images?
It is helpful - it's an empowering way for me to sort through what this past year-plus has been like, to record this moment in history from an under-represented perspective, and to raise my voice to call out inequities that became even more glaring.
Through making and sharing this work I have connected more with Disabled artists and the Disability Community online. The access, care, and connection from the Disability Community are what nourished my soul during this pandemic. I am very grateful that as a community we have co-created these spaces and networks of care.
Two Arms Length (Six Feet), 2021, Chlorophyll print on spotted begonia, 10x10",
Image description: A long rounded begonia leaf with yellow, green, and red hues and faint spots, on a black background. At the very left and right edges of the leaf are two masked faces. Each extending an arm that meets in the middle of the leaf exchanging a bottle of hand sanitizer.
What is your relationship to photography?
I love the medium. I fell for it in my teens and am grateful that some 20 years later I am even more into it. One of my most favorite aspects of photography is how malleable it is. There is so much exciting and creative experimentation occurring that is pushing the boundaries.
I do also bring a critical lens to the medium. I think it is important to acknowledge the ways photography has been a tool of oppression for many communities. I have spent a lot of time researching the ways in which photography has othered the Disabled body. This research also informs the decisions I make as an artist and photographer, wanting to challenge the oppressive ableist history of the medium and reclaim/assert authentic Illness/Disability representation.
Pandemic Eugenics XXI (Vaccine Deprioritization), 2021, text stamped into ivy leaf 10x10"
Image description: A green ivy leaf on a black background. Stamped into the leaf is the text “Unwanted Task”. This is a reference to Connecticut’s decision to not prioritize high-risk communities for vaccines citing that figuring out who to prioritize and how to do it was an “unwanted task”.
Has the pandemic shifted the way you approach your work and/or photography at all?
The pandemic has changed how I work in a few ways.
Before the pandemic, I would go out for walks to find leaves to print on (which I still do) but recently, in the past year, I have started growing an assortment of foliage - some of which I source leaves from to print on. I live alone and having a nursery of plants in my home has been really comforting.
I would say the biggest change in my work is the addition of text. When I started to make work about the pandemic experience I knew right away I needed to add text. I felt like at this moment I needed to speak more directly and urgently than in previous work. I tried many different ways of conveying the text and finally started typing the text directly into the leaves.
Thank you so much to Megan Bent for taking the time to speak with Too Tired Project. You can explore more of her work on her website.