How To Create A Successful Macro Portfolio
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Loading... - Kielo Toivonen
- 08 Jul 2022
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As a writer and storyteller, I’ve always been interested in language. Looking at how signs, symbols, drawings and alphabets have helped us to communicate with each over the centuries is a source of great fascination to me. If you look at the pictorial ‘writing’ – drawings of feathers, eyes, beetles, trees, lotus flowers etc – these codes for speech and thought seem a million miles away from our modern-day language.
But if you look at the washing label on your favourite jumper, is the drawing of the tumble dryer with the strike through it not a hieroglyph of sorts? You can see examples everywhere: at the side of a motorway, on your phone and, of course, on the buttons, dials and menu systems of digital cameras. When speed is of the essence, sometimes a picture or symbol reaches the brain quicker than the written word.
Setting the seed
When I was around nine or ten, my mum handed me a little book called The Language of Flowers. This lovely hardback was filled with beautiful paintings and handwritten notes. Each note revealed the flower’s ‘meaning’ (some were traditional, others were made up by the author). Almond, for example, stood for stupidity or indiscretion, while Christmas rose meant cheerfulness under adversity.
I was smitten by the idea that flowers could talk, or at least serve as a conduit for thoughts, emotions and feelings. Years later, I came across the book Nymans Language by John Newling. This wonderful object celebrates Newling’s work around language and gardens. Like me, the artist believes that language can be more than just written words or speech. For him, the colours and shapes in a garden create, ‘A kind of natural language that is shared by many people.’
Finding the right language
Deciding on the parameters
If I was going to create a coherent set of pictures, I knew consistency was key. I wanted to use natural light, so there was no point making multiple trips to the garden and just hoping that the conditions would be the same. Everything in nature is in flux, so unless I wanted to spend hours trying to ‘fake’ things on the computer I needed to shoot all of the pictures under the same conditions. Read More...
