Clara showing me her past work on the living room floor.
We encountered our first moment of dismay of our time together. I could tell she was frustrated with not only the process but also the product. She didn’t feel as if what she was creating virtually reflected not just who she was but what her work was. That’s one of the most terrifying feelings for an artist. She became distressed as did I. Was this wrong of me to try and push Clara in this direction? Was she growing to dislike her own work because of the suggestions I had made, and what would this mean for the future of Home? We ended the trip not entirely on a low note but it certainly felt like one from where we had been just 24 hours before. Did this mean that all of this time and energy was misguided? Should I have done better about expressing what this would fully be before Clara arrived? Perhaps, but in the end none of that mattered.
Meeting back at Home we reflected on our time in the desert and everything we both had already done and had yet to do. Before we made our trek out Clara had begun working on her website and was seemingly close to being finished. We took some product photos for the work she had made before we left and we were going to put the finishing touches on everything before she flew out of San Diego. However the day before her flight we went to a cafe to do exactly this and seemingly nothing went or felt right.
One of the original product photos we took in collaboration.
Clara called me a day or two after she left San Diego and the first words out of her mouth were “Good news!” Music to my ears. She told me that after she left she didn’t even sleep the following night. She stayed up staring at her laptop, incessantly staring at past imagery to inform perhaps where the mistranslation occurred. One word, scans! Clara had always used scans of her work to show the deckled (feathered or frayed) edges and intricacies in her work that were lost when merely captured on a phone camera.
Continued on THE END OF CLARA'S TIME AT HOME