“There’s a constant tension between the two,” says photographer Frances F. Denny of being both an artist and a mother. “I think the only way to let the tension release a little bit is to try and make work about it.”
Inspired by motherhood, the occult, and photography itself, the images in Denny’s new photo series, Spellwork, pair flowers with artifacts from daily life to otherworldly effect. The photographs, on view November 9 through December 23 at Clamp Gallery in Chelsea, are still lifes, but there is nothing still about them—much like life with a young child.
Denny’s last photo series was Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America, an exhibition and accompanying book that inspired her to consider what magic means to different people. “It’s this overused, empty word that seems kind of hocus-pocus-y or Harry Potter-y,” she says over the phone from her home in Pound Ridge, New York. It wasn’t until Denny shot a witch named Starhawk that she realized photography is, in itself, a form of magic. “It’s this alchemy of light and vision and glass,” she says. “Making these images was ritualistic, and to me they feel like incantations or magic spells.” Their titles were drawn from Starhawk’s 1979 book The Spiral Dance, which encouraged Denny to think about magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will.”
It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to add relics of daily life, like beaded bracelets, dice, and Goldfish crackers, to the compositions. “The night before the first of the shoots, I had this craving to include things that would refract light in interesting ways,” says Denny, explaining how she ended up ransacking her five-year-old daughter Virginia’s playroom for “sparkly stuff.” The resulting compositions play off each other chromatically and spatially: A Slinky mimics the curving neck of a stalk of wild garlic, while a fringed purple tulip’s peeling petals evoke the undone wrapper of a grape lollipop. Even combinations that seem perfectly coordinated—a purple bearded iris against Virginia’s purple-markered coloring sheet—were spontaneous pairings. While Denny is quick to concede that flowers are “one of the most ubiquitous subjects in our history, maybe aside from the female nude,” a tea rose framed by, say, a suite of Haribo gummy bears lined up at attention manages to feel like something new. (Her blooms came from Dutch Flower Line in Chelsea’s flower district or, in the case of the Cafe au Lait dahlias, her own Westchester backyard. She photographed them in her studio, a converted barn on her family’s property.)
“I do feel like I made these pictures very guided by intuition and gut, which is not typically how I am as a person,” admits Denny, “and it required a degree of letting go to let things get weird on set.”
The combinations highlight how beauty interacts with the detritus of having children and being a parent, the duality of mothers and artists, and the “triumphant, deathly dance of those two roles merging into one,” as she puts it. “It feels like being an artist and a mother are, on some level, impossible to incorporate with each other, in the sense that it’s hard to be fully both at the same time,” Denny says, with pregnant pauses. “[You] kind of bump back and forth between them.
“I think on some level what the picture’s trying to do is have these two sides of a personality coexist in harmony,” she continues. “Right?”
Or, at the very least, cast a spell.
