Growing the Knowledge of Photography

An Interview with Sara Angelucci

The photography of Sara Angelucci complicates beauty. When we look at her images of a wide array of plants and flowers, we are overtaken by their form and colour and vitality. Because they are so attractive our inclination is to look at them very closely. And when we pay such close attention, we see evidence that other living things are working to alter the surrounding beauty. We can make out crawling and flying things, their presence discernible in chewed and spotted leaves and in a ash of light reflected off a spider’s web. In her own words, hers is a world abundant with “companions and competitors.”

There is another quality that complicates our read of these photographs and it, too, is connected to beauty. The images carry an unmistakable quality of being haunted, of being equally about what we can see and what we can’t see. In images like Man/Maple and Woman/Winter/Forest from her “Arboretum” series, 2016, she gives us two seasons of figures ghosting a landscape. We wonder if the man and the woman are with us or gone from us. It is a lyric haunting; its equivalent in literature is the poignancy of elegy.

Angelucci is aware of the weight of this intermingling. “I think grief and loss run through everything I do,” she says in the following interview. “It filters the way I look at things.” The cause of her grief was the unexpected death of both her father and mother only three years apart. Hers was a close-knit Italian family, and her parents’ death made her realize that dying is not only the loss of an individual but also the loss of a unique body of knowledge. In one way, her work with both private and public archives has been a compensatory process, a way of looking for answers that, for all our efforts to nd them, can remain fugitive.

But it was the tragic death of her sister in 2015 that was her most devastating loss. For two years she was unable to make art. Throughout that period she gardened. Working in her own small domestic garden, she recognized that while she was overwhelmed by the tragedy of death, everywhere around her she saw life. It was mourning and morning. It was a way of biding time and a way of shifting time’s effect. “By permitting myself not to make anything,” she came to realize, “I started to make something again.”

She continues to work in the Möbius loop of endings and beginnings. The trace along its line is variously fecund and gravid and exhilarating. She works at night, and out of that nocturnal gathering she brings light. Listen to, then look at, the ower shop, plant store and herb garden she collected in Montottone, Le Marche, her family village in Italy: for the world traveller, there is French Honeysuckle, Yorkshire Fog, Italian Arum and Jerusalem Thorn; for our palette board, Red Valerian, White Ramping Fumitory, Black Locust and Wild Grape; for the common touch, Hedge Nettle, Meadow Fleabane, Hairy Tare and Pellitory-of- the-wall; and, finally, out of her darkness, she harvests romance in Pyramidal Orchids, Forget-me-nots, Blue Crown Passionflower and Love-in-a-mist.

An image designated as May 22 in the “Bella di Notte” series, 2023–ongoing, is a metonymy for Angelucci’s entire artful project. Its full title is a list of component parts: May 22 – Common Poppy, German Chamomile, Common Mugwort, White Garden Snail, Wall Barley. The snail hangs in its own trompe-l’oeil roundness, the serrated leaves of the Mugwort cut into black space, the flowers of German Chamomile are like yellow-tipped shuttlecocks, and the feathery flower spikes of Wall Barley sit quietly beneath all the surface action. At the top of the frame, a brilliant red Poppy looks like a resting buttery, while other buds—opening up or folding in—are suspended in different stages of their blooming. The image is becoming and unbecoming, caught in a combination of delicate ravening and dramatic revelling. It is Nature read in truth and awe.

Sara Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist working in photography and video. She has exhibited across Canada and in France, the United States and China. Her recent exhibitions are “Nocturnal Botanical” at the Stephen Bulger Gallery from May 4 to June 15, 2024, and “Undergrowth” at the Art Gallery of Mississauga from April 20 to July 7, 2024.

She was interviewed by phone to Toronto on May 22, 2024.

BORDER CROSSINGS: In earlier interviews you’ve talked about wandering through the fields of your family farm as a child.

SARA ANGELUCCI: My parents came to Canada in the ’50s and settled in Hamilton, Ontario. They were in their mid-20s and were immigrant labourers. My dad worked at Stelco and my mom worked in a factory that made men’s suits. They didn’t have an opportunity to get an education—my dad was 13 during the war and my mom was 11. They came from farms in Italy where their families worked as sharecroppers and, eventually, they bought a small farm in Waterdown, outside of Hamilton. My grandparents lived with us and they didn’t speak English, so I grew up bilingual from the get-go. I had a brother and two sisters, and a farm was a perfect place for kids because there was so much to do. The family farm was only 20 acres, but for a child 20 acres could be 1,000. There were adjacent farms as well, so the land went on. We got lost in this place. It was beautiful.

What did your father farm?

He continued to work at the factory, but we grew tons of vegetables and tomatoes that we started to take to the farmers’ market. We had our own animals, too— chickens, rabbits, sheep—and my dad would raise a cow and have it slaughtered and fill our freezer. Because they had grown up on farms, my parents missed food of that quality. I have very fond childhood memories. I’ve always loved salad and so my mom would say, “Go pick what you want.” I’d get on my bicycle with a little basket on my handlebar, and would ride the path around the farm and stop at every patch and pick whatever I wanted. I’d get lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers and take them home for my dinner.

Was there a large Italian immigration to Hamilton?

There’s a huge Italian community in Hamilton. My dad could go to work, go grocery shopping, get his hair cut, come home and never speak English. That was wonderful in some ways, but in other ways it wasn’t. His English was not great because he could get by speaking it so very little. He had tons of Italian friends and we had lots of relatives. My mom had five brothers and they all immigrated to Hamilton as well. My dad’s family remained in Italy.

How did you become interested in art? It doesn’t sound like art was central to your upbringing.

Not at all. I grew up in this very small town where there was no art. Going to the local Catholic church was what introduced me to art. Honest to god’s truth. The priest would talk and my mind would wander as I looked at all the Bible scenes, the stained glass, the paintings, the sculpture, and I was so happy doing that. It just drew me in. Then when I was 14, I started taking art classes at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. I’m on the board of the Art Gallery of Hamilton now, and I’ve said to them, “I don’t think I would be an artist if it weren’t for this gallery.” I remember walking in there and feeling like I had walked into the biggest cathedral in the world. Seeing these huge abstract paintings just blew my head off. It changed my life, really.

Was it later on that you realized you wanted to work with the image through photography rather than as a painter or a drawer or a sculptor?

I got my first camera when I was 18, but I thought art was painting and drawing. I did a degree in art history first and then I went into studio and had this very formal drawing and painting education. I was at the University of Guelph studying drawing and painting when I met Suzy Lake and started working in photography. There was something about the process that I gravitated towards. With painting you start with this blank canvas that you have to fill. With a photograph you start with a contact sheet, and it gives you options. It was almost like I could see all these little sketches immediately. I could experiment and quickly come up with something. There was a freedom in the process. I have to credit Suzy because she gave me permission to let the personal be part of making art and I needed that at the time. The funny thing is, I still dream about being a painter, and I started taking painting classes again four years ago. As soon as I picked up a brush and ran it across the surface of the canvas, I felt like I’d come home. Perhaps there’s something of a painting aesthetic in my work. I don’t think I’m a photographer’s photographer. I don’t shoot on the street. I still think a lot about the singular image and I think that comes from studying painting.

What made you decide that your Italian cultural background would be fertile territory to investigate through the medium of photography and video?

Just before I went to NSCAD for graduate school, both my parents died. My mom was 58 and my dad died three years later. I’ve now outlived both of them. I had never thought about death or about illness, and suddenly my mom got cancer. It came out of nowhere and she was dead in a year and a half. Then my dad had surgery for his heart and he died on the operating table. We were very close and I was in shock. I was like, “Who am I? Why didn’t I ask them things? There’s so much about them and our family history that I don’t know.” It set me thinking about my cultural identity. I was in Halifax going to grad school, and that’s where my parents had landed in Canada. Pier 21 wasn’t a museum yet, so one of the things I did was walk around this empty pier. There was still a chalkboard with the names of the last immigration boats written on it. It was crazy but I needed to ground myself in the grief of losing them, and find answers to questions that I’d never thought to ask them.

What’s interesting is that your quest for a familial and cultural past wants objects from which memory can be made. In early works like “Stillness” (2003) and Questions She’ll Never Answer (1997), you imply that some personal history is not recoverable, but it is still something you’re looking for.

That’s exactly right. What I realized in that moment is that photography fails us. There is a promise when you take an image of a person that you will be able to keep them, but it’s simply not true. Christian Boltanski’s famous observation is, “They say that we die twice, once when we die, and a second time when no one recognizes our picture.”

You seem to accept, maybe even encourage, the epistemology of doubt that is a product of the photographic process. In The Twirl of a Butterfly’s Tongue (2022), you deliberately confuse the standard taxonomies from a slide collection. It’s as if you’re taking advantage of the inadequacies of photography as a way to actually tell us the truth.

Part of that is because the lantern slide collection I used for that film from the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences is discarded and was a mess. At one time that collection would have been kept in precise order for presentations. But because it’s a discarded collection and the technology is obsolete, order doesn’t matter anymore. At the Visual Studies Workshop where it’s now housed, things are organized in broad categories like “Weather,” which contains all kinds of images from tornadoes to volcanoes. So to answer your question, I wouldn’t say I encourage it, but I would say I accept it and make it apparent. That acceptance has come through looking at both my own archives and public archives. There’s an apt saying about archives that I think summarizes them well that Steve Reinke said in one of his films, “An archive is a mausoleum posing as a vast garden.” It promises all these things, but unless you can find them, they’re buried there forever.

Do you distinguish between working with found images and working with family images as sources? Do they tap into some different part of our image-recognizing brain or our meaning-making brain?

I think you’re invested in your personal archives. I’m invested in who those people are. But in Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Pierre Bourdieu talks about how basically all our family pictures are the same. If you laid down your family pictures next to mine, we would both find the passport photograph, the happy birthday photograph, the Christmas photograph with the tree and the wedding photograph. There’s none of the in-between; we don’t see the fights; we don’t see divorces. The family album records the highlights of family life. So the difference between the personal and the public is the investment I have in those people. You don’t have an investment in my family pictures, but you would recognize the genre. You would be able to look at it and say, “Oh, that’s a graduation picture. My mom had a similar graduation picture.”

So the photographic typologies carry meaning as we look at them?

Exactly. Christian Boltanski plays with that in his installations. We can insert ourselves into those histories because we recognize the idea of children playing on the street. We recognize the school group picture. We recognize those memories as ones that could be our own. It may not be exactly the same, but it’s close enough. In public archives, I’m looking for different things. I’m asking different questions about the content and history of an image.

Can you trace an evolution in the family work you’ve done? Did the information and perspective provided by one body of work suggest where you might go as you continued this family inquiry?

I don’t think it’s that linear. I did reach a point after about 10 years where I thought maybe I’ve mourned enough and I can let that go now. It was never a conscious decision, but it felt like I could move away.

What about your relationship to a pair of roles that photography has played historically: as taxonomy and documentary?

I don’t think my work is ever purely one thing or another. I certainly touch the edges of those things, but like every artist I use what’s of interest in the moment and I don’t think about things in a pure sense. I make up the rules as I go along for each project. I get very interested in the materials that I discover, and I want to play with those materials. I could have made another 20 birds in the “Aviary” series (2013), but after I made 13, I was done: “I know what I’m doing now, and I’ve said what I need to say with this. I’m not interested anymore.”

What were you after in making those fantastical hybrid images?

When I started I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I was concerned that they were going to destroy my art career. I went on a self-directed residency on Toronto Island. I had taken boxes of anonymous cartes de visite that I’d been collecting and I spread them out on a table. I was reading this book on theories of memory and one of them said, “To capture a memory is like trying to capture a bird in an aviary filled with birds.” I had been reading a lot about the extinction of species, and I started thinking about the need for empathy and a deep connection with nature. And I wondered, what if I created some kind of hybrid between a human and a bird to express that idea? So I reached out to the Royal Ontario Museum and met the ornithologist there, toured the collection and asked him to show me the endangered and extinct birds. At first, I was sketching out these creatures and only had a couple done when I had a studio visit with Emelie Chhangur, who loved them and offered me a show at the Art Gallery of York University. It didn’t matter to her that they weren’t finished. She really believed in me. She gave me a year to produce an exhibition, and I kept working on them, following my gut. I was terrified because I’d never done anything like this before and I was worried that people would think it was crazy. But at the same time, I’d reached a place in my work where I had stopped looking externally for approval. I think that’s when you really become a mature artist. You can’t worry about what other people are going to think. I learned so much spending time with those birds. There’s no other way to say it: it transformed my environmental consciousness. When you hold an extinct bird in your hand, like the Northern Curlew that’s been gone since the early 1900s, it changes how you feel about everything you look at in nature.

They’re exquisite, but at the same time they edge towards the grotesque.

Some people hate them, and I’m totally okay with that. I get it. They’re creepy. The worst reaction you can get as an artist is dismissal. I think making people uncomfortable is good.

The idea that the camera is a record of ghosting has run throughout your work. The images in “Black Flowers” (2017) have an elegant ghostliness about them, and in “Arboretum” (2016), Woman/Winter/Forest and Woman/ Ash have a ghostly and haunting effect. Was that something you were after, or was it something that emerged in the process of the images being made?

I think grief and loss run through everything I do. It filters the way I look at things. But it wasn’t intentional to make them ghostly. In the “Arboretum” pictures I was trying to push the figure into the background. That was a visual strategy. But they are very ghostly. It’s true. I think it’s fair to say that I recognize a haunting quality as something important in these projects.

Prior to your parents dying, you said, you’d never thought about death and then your sister’s suicide in 2015 forced you to think about it. How does one react to the death of someone you love? What did it do to your practice as an artist?

It absolutely froze it for several years. After my sister died, there were projects I was working on that I could finish, but I couldn’t start anything new. I tried to make a project about losing Clara, but nothing worked. It’s like she resisted it. Eventually I had to accept that grief was overtaking everything. And by permitting myself not to make anything, I started to make something again.

You said that you needed to find a way to care for something other than yourself. Was working in your 12 x 15-foot garden the beginning of your being able to make things again?

Absolutely. I had to surrender. I had to say to myself that I wasn’t making art, that I wasn’t making a project. I had to say, “I’m just going to work in the garden.” Once I did, I slowly saw the potential to take that into a project, but it took a couple of years before that happened. In the garden I was facing her tragic death, but everywhere I looked I saw life. Everywhere things were growing, changing, thriving. In caring for the garden, I was caring for myself—and I saw hope. It helped me move on.

When you made “Nocturnal Botanical Ontario” (2019– ongoing), you decided to work in the dark. Was the intent to deliberately disorient yourself? It’s an unusual thing to take away what a photographer needs, and that is to be able to see.

At the start of this project I tried to work in the greenhouses at Allan Gardens. I worked with the lid off the scanner because I didn’t want to crush the specimens. However, it was far too bright in the greenhouse because the roof is glass and it blasted the scanner with too much light. All the colours came out distorted and strange. And even though greenhouses are beautiful, I thought, this is so unnatural. Nothing grows here together that is together in the world. This makes no sense. My home garden made sense to me because I have an emotional attachment to it, but I didn’t know what I was trying to do in the greenhouse. The whole “Nocturnal Botanical” project grew out of a reaction to the failure of the greenhouse. I was asking myself, “Why don’t I go to where plants grow together naturally? And why don’t I try working with an absence of light? If too much light isn’t working, what would an absence of light be like?” It was a total experiment. Pardon the pun—a shot in the dark.

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