Shelley Marlow

I take photographs motivated by love, respect and longing for the natural and supernatural worlds. I create an artifice through the digital camera. As I photographed off the grid writer Bill Vollmann, he cried out, “I’ve been digitized!”

In the work, "PHOTOGRAPHING THE FAIRY REALM" The horror of war plus 2007’s new year’s eve’s hanging perpetrated by the U.S.’s unelected president, took the wind out of typically elaborate celebrations. I’d previously glittered up a pile of postcards from different eras and places around the globe for the holidays. I used these postcards as a backdrop in a diorama set to imply time and space travel for the toy representations of the fairy realm. I wanted to speak of the desire for escape through travel and yet the impossibility of escape. Impossibility because no matter where you go there you are with your awareness.

 Pleasurable-good artifices from Huysman’s time that I like are: mechanical birds that sing, amusement parks, underwater breathing machines, elaborate opera sets, nun outfits worn by non-nuns.

Bad artifices-deception from today that I fear are: those that deny the existence of global warming and green house effects where humanity may be dropped off like impetigo scabs from the face of the earth.

Painterly and ecological concerns permeate my fiction writing and photography. As well, I am reinventing the narrative around romance and gender.

Shelley Marlow 2007