Spider silk and film grain in Paulina Guilmoth’s photographs

Transmission 215: Interview with Paulina Guilmoth

Paulina Guilmoth is a visual artist. She is drawing humans in her enchanting path. Have you never applied a powdered red color on a spider web you had discovered beside the river and glued it to the paper? Audiences are left in the middle of the ceremony by Pia’s blurry pictures, which are full of luminous ghosts and light distortions. Using spider silk, flowers, and other natural materials, she creates tiny sculptures, then watches as the earth, water, wind, light, or a wayward moth start interacting with them in unexpected ways. Pia’s images are the results of her patient activities of co-creation.

Sometimes the creation is the laborious, multi-night process of developing confidence with animals. She created a love letter to the central Maine backwoods, transgender women, lesbians, gay folks, and rural working-class people. As Pia builds a utopia that is just barely accessible, she discovers and builds beauty and a sense of belonging. The first two years of Pia’s gender transition are chronicled in Flowers Drink the River, where she documents the beauty and horror of becoming herself and a woman in a tiny, right-wing town in rural Maine. The dreamlike setting of Flowers Drink the River by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth is filled with mud, stone, and soil, while the woodland floors are damp with shining dew. Pia discovers a captivating, mystical presence in her everyday adventures amid the fields, rivers, and forests of her home by using a large format camera and meticulous analogue processes. Pia’s sincerity and genuineness are just as evident as her photographs. Her unique voice in modern photography is demonstrated by her thoughts on identity, community, and the transformational potential of art. She gives us a priceless gift in a world that is sometimes too busy to stop and observe: the opportunity to see. 

Official site | Instagram

What draws you to analog processes in a digital world, do you think film has an emotional weight that digital can’t replicate? 

It’s really about the tactility of the medium, and the preciousness of each frame (because it costs lots of money) that makes me spend more time with each photograph. I think it’s made me have to create formula’s and techniques that work. It requires patience. With digital I feel like I would get sloppy and take hundreds of photographs that would end up being boring and the process would be less hands-on. I tried digital about ten years ago, at the beginning of my time with camera’s and it didn’t feel right for me. Also the appearance of film grain, and the way that analogue photographs degrade is very special.

Can you please tell us about your beginning and the main challenges? What gave you the straight to go ahead?

At first, years ago, I was using a small point and shoot 35mm camera and taking photographs of local county fairs, demo derbys, and my friends doing chaotic things in the woods. Snapshots. Recently I have been revisiting that work, and making new things with a point and shoot camera. I need a break from the slowness of the 4×5, and I think I miss a lot of these special fleeting moments in my life.

 When I picked up a 4×5 in 2018 I was instantly obsessed with how it could render small details. I really became transfixed in the small textures, water droplets, and fine details it could pick up on flowers, spider webs, and skin. That’s when my work really shifted. Rather than being witness to the rituals that were happening around me, I was beginning to stage and construct my own rituals. I think of my work with a 4×5 as sculpture, because I am really making, arranging, and re-creating things out in the woods.

Beyond visual influences, are there specific music philosophical ideas, literary works, or spiritual concepts that significantly influence your artistic thinking and creation?

I look for beauty in the world, and that cathartic experience that happens when I am looking at something beautiful in the natural world around me, or at a person I love. I’ve never had interest in theory, academic topics, philosophies, etc. I consider myself pretty “simple” in that sense I guess.  

I enjoy being around my friends, walking around the woods, the ritual of doing my makeup every morning, staring at the river, finding wild flowers, going fishing, shooting guns, skateboarding, driving around the backroads, sneaking into abandoned houses, going to the local movie theater to watch horror movies, collecting vhs tapes, digging through trash, going to rural junk-shops to find weird family photographs and historical documents, listening to really loud music, shooting estrogen into my stomach every week, gardening, playing with my cats, listening to music. 

My biggest musical influences both old and new have been Enya, Gallhammer, Ana Roxanne, The Germs, Hyd, Lucinda Williams, Hank Williams (Sr.), Grouper, Ragana, Moor Mother, Hole, Ultra Caro, Elusin,  and so many I can’t think of at the moment.

I’ve been in this mode of collecting home-recorded vhs tapes in the area of Maine that I live showing different events that have happened around me like storms, fires, community gatherings, etc.

 Your images often feel like they live between waking and dreaming. How do you choreograph that space of ambiguity? Do you photograph with an image in your mind first, or do you discover the image through the act itself?

I always have an image in my brain before I shoot. I make lists in my studio of things i’d like to try, and sculptures i’d like to create. For example my shot list right now says “spider web with water droplets”, and “eating ass in a field”. Haha. 

Most often there is an act of discovery with each photograph. Because I typically am working with organic and fragile matter, there is a big window of chance that comes into play. Things change, break, fly away, as I am setting up my camera. I sometimes find that I need to change my lighting setup, or discover that a different angle makes a more interesting result, or that I want to add something more to an image. 

– How do you manage the relationship between intention and intuition when working on your projects? Is there a point where you let the flux or the process itself guide the direction of an image?

All of the time!. My initial intentions with my work are constantly changing as I change and evolve and throughout the span of a shoot. I work with materials that are organic and unpredictable for the most part. What helps retain excitement in my work is how I am constantly learning from my surroundings and how I can never fully control the things I photograph. Spiders, moths, deer, flowers all move and disappear and I am frequently having to make last minute adjustments while shooting. Or having to respond to an animal or insects sudden movement.

What’s your relationship to silence in your work, how does it shape the mood or pacing of an image or series?

Most often I am working in the woods at night with the constant drone of insects, moving water, and rustling grass. This isn’t silence but it feels like a type of silence. It’s meditative and hypnotic. I feel like I can transcend in these moments and most of my inner dialogue becomes hidden in the process.

Your artwork engages also with familial or ancestral presence. Is there a myth, superstition, or family story that echoes in your photographic language? Do you see photography as a way of rewriting memory, or preserving it?

I’m never trying to tell a specific story when I’m making photographs. It’s an intuitive practice for me: where I am channeling the visual images that I see in my brain and then trying to re-create them in front of me. My work follows me around through my life and then after I make something I can sit down and process the hidden meanings behind it. It’s autobiographical, but I’m never forcing a narrative. Sometimes a photograph can be as simple as “ I like the way this looks and it restores my sense of wonder” and other times it can speak to some intense transition or event in my life. My latest book Flowers Drink the River follows me through the first two years of my medical gender transition. During this time and now in the present I was dealing with a lot of grief about losing people in my life, fearing my safety, and witnessing the horrors and hatred bubbling up in the world, and also this magical feeling of intense joy and transcendence as my body and brain chemicals were changing. This book was made at a time when I was finally being able to love myself, and no longer thinking about killing myself every single day. So yeah there is so much emotion packed into the work. But when I’m actually photographing I feel like my brain can just shut down and I enter into another realm where I’m subconsciously channeling/processing all of my thoughts, worries, gratitude, etc. And in the end it tells a story, or thousands of stories. 

Do you consider your series and projects to be self-contained, or do they bleed into each other like one long visual diary?

I feel like I have been, and will be, making essentially one continuous “body of work” for the rest of my life. Even when I’m working with different mediums it’s always about my life and the people that I love, and the place I call home. 

How do imperfections, grain, blur, overexposure, function in your work? Are they artifacts, emotions, or both?

They are definitely both. The visual language that I use becomes the emotion and the emotions behind my work can only be conveyed through the visual language I use and the physicality of the photo negative. I’m really inspired by the early pictorialist photographers and the emphasis of beauty, rather than journalistic “straight” photography. For me it’s always beauty that comes first and then everything else follows. It’s just like with music: besides raw demo’s, the effects and processing of each instrument is often more important as the meaning behind a song, or the raw chords within. I feel like my home-made lens filters, and the way I process my film are like effects pedals, and different synth parameters used in a song.

 You often bring nature into your work in visceral ways. What does the natural world offer you visually or spiritually?

I live in a rural place with only about 1,500 residents. My home and the places I spend my time everyday are surrounded by the natural world. Everything I see and do revolves around nature and its massive presence which also bleeds into my psyche and my spirit. Nature is a constant reminder of change, growth, death and wonder. I feel like I have already died once in this life, and that was when I decided to transition. I feel like I have bloomed twice in this life and that was when I was born and then once after I left my old testosterone-wrecked body behind. Before and during my transition nature was one of the constant reminders that I wasn’t alone in this world.

Do you consider your artwork to be rooted in a particular geography, or do you aim to create a sense of placelessness?

I think in many ways, at least with my 4×5 work, I am creating a feeling of placelessness. There are often no horizons, no landmarks, and no signage. But personally I strongly feel like my work is absolutely about one very specific place. And that is my home in rural Maine. But that is only because everything I make is right here at home. The narratives that my work seems to make are more universal though as I have stripped away most local signifiers. 

Many artists find certain constraints to be creatively important to achieve milestones. Are there any self-imposed limitations or rules you sometimes set for yourself during the creative process? In an increasingly digital world, what is the significance or unique value you hope is a visual milestone to your audience?

. Everything I make must be made in Maine around where I live

. It must bring me joy

. Death to A.I.

. I won’t use more than 16 sheets of film per idea/photograph
I grew up without any trans women photographers to look up to. So I guess it would be that this work is made by a trans woman.

Photos courtesy of Paulina Guilmoth

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.