Text and artwork by Janelle Lynch

Interview by Gabe Shah

How did your series “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” come to be?

In Fall 2022 I went to Amagansett, NY for a self-designed and self-funded residency. I spent six weeks there in solitude with just a bike for transportation. I hadn’t worked in a seaside landscape since graduate school in 1999. Everything was new—the place, the solitariness, the intense desire in my body to make things. I began to collect remains on the beach and in the dunes––an osprey wing, driftwood, and sea plants. I biked to a nearby flower farm and retrieved flowers that had fallen to the ground. I was compelled to make records of those natural elements and by so doing, affirming their fundamental value. Sprites and fairies arrived at the Angel Visitation Station I set up on a small table in the house where I was staying. Bue Pixie appeared one day—part flower, part pine branch, part other. There was a sense of recognition. Of kinship. I instinctually knew I had to work with my own body. And so I did.

During the winter I returned to the New York Studio School where I’ve been studying drawing and painting since 2015. I was drawing on a very large scale—80x44 inches—making transcriptions of a photographic portrait of myself. When it came time to return to Amagansett for another residency in April 2023, I packed the remaining roll of watercolor paper from which I'd been drawing to use for cyanotypes. That enabled a change in scale from the work from the fall. But, I realize now, that the experience making my last drawing, which combined the portrait with elements from Giotto and other art historical works, stayed with me and influenced the imagery I was making in my cyanotypes. The drawing suggested a direct communication with an angel. And that, essentially, is what I’ve been seeking in my work for the last five years—both in alternative processes and large-format photography. I’ve been exploring the question: Is communication with and connection to the spiritual world possible? And I’ve found that it is.