Magnolia
Amsterdam 2022
Edition:
10x 20x30 cm
7x 30x40 cm
5x 40x50 cm
Printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper + 1 cm white border
Delivered with a numbered and digitally signed certificate of authenticity
"This image was taken in my mother’s garden. It is part of my body of work titled, “I Hope the Sun Is Shining Where You Are” which was made into an installation and an intricately designed hand-bound book that incorporated a nimble conversation between two places, two parts of me and the people I love most. I grew up in Amsterdam, I have a profound connection to many places in this city but above all to my mother and her house. When I fell in love and moved across the world to Southern California to become a writer and be with this person, I was split in two. This work is an exploration of the fluidity of topographic memory: when one moves away from a space and it loses its physicality, all you have left is the memories of that space.
After a while of moving back and forth between multiple spaces, these blend. The photograph here, can become a crutch in finding the tangible within the liminal. This is a work of missingness, of being further away from loved ones than your soul can bare, wherever you are. The magnolia specifically, is a symbol of nostalgia and fear in this work that kept returning. This tree blooming ever so shortly in my mother’s garden became an iconographic pattern that whispered: things bloom in the blink of an eye, if you’re away too long you might miss it."
Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken (1999, Amsterdam) currently lives and works in San Diego, California. She holds a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Netherlands and she is enrolled in the MFA Poetry program at San Diego State University. She is Development Director and Assistant Editor at Poetry International and a Teaching Associate for SDSU's department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Her photography has been exhibited in galleries across The Netherlands and published in numerous magazines and papers, such as De Volkskrant, VPRO Magazine and Den Haag Centraal. Zea Pippi Lotte’s non-fiction writing has been published in multiple Dutch papers including a full feature article in Focus Magazine. Her poetry is forthcoming in Foothill Poetry Journal and has been published by Michigan Quarterly Review and Pineapple Road Press.