Artist Statement for the series Surface/Where the Ocean's Meet
Hawaiians do not talk in the language of "artist statement", they talk "story", so as a part Hawaiian this statement incorperates both.
I have been photographing synchronized women swimmers as they prepare for
competition. In this process a personal narrative emerged for me that mirrored my own
journey as a woman, specifically my loss of identity and the journey I took to find it again.
As a first generation part Hawaiian born off the Islands I was assimilated into the Western culture. My father told me that he would not have married my mother if she had looked Hawaiian, that caucasians are the superior race, and that emotions were a sign of a persons weakness. As a little girl I felt like I had been born into the wrong family and culture.
My self-esteem as a lesser being began to evolve when our family went to the Big Island for the first time and we spent a month with my Grandparents who lived up by the volcanoes.
The first night after we arrived I was awoken in the middle of the night by my mother telling me to get out of bed and to not change out of my nightgown because the volcano was erupting and we all had to get in the car and leave. Looking out the bedroom window I saw colors I had never seen before of orange and red, I was 11 years old and I was terrified. Fearfully I got out of bed and grabbed the one thing I did not want to leave behind, my Christmas present that I had just received, an instant Kodak camera loaded with film. To my distress, the car drove towards the spurting lava and not towards the safety of the sea. I thought the adults had gone crazy. Then my Hawaiian Grandfather turned to me in the car and told me that the volcano goddess Madame Pele loved me because I shared her red hair and she was welcoming me home. He said that Pele was so powerful he regularly gave her a bottle of vodka as a present just to make sure he was in good favor with her. The idea of women with power was completely new to me. For the first time I felt pride, because I was a female and Hawaiian. In minutes we were there, watching Pele do her fire dance. Stepping outside the car I smelled sulfur for the first time, then put my first camera to my left eye and took my first photographs. To this day I still love the smell of sulfur in the darkroom.
As time passed I heard stories about my female anscestors. Some were more powerful than their husbands and that they could have many husbands. Through the Hawaiian paradigm I found self esteem. I felt like I was the surface of the water because I saw how seperate my two worlds were, just like the world of air and the world of water. Water was the Hawaiian world, and I felt more empowered by the water than the air.
In this series of images the women are strong like Hawaiian women. They are also like my anscestors who felt at home in the water and could travel great distances of water. This series is photographic in honor of my Hawaiian Grandfather whose lifelong hobby was photography and they are painted because my Grandmother hand painted on my Grandfathers prints.
Surface won a first place award from the International Photography Awards in 2010, and
will be featured in their award winner’s book. One of the images from the series was
selected to be a bus shelter installation as part of a 4 Cultures grant with Metro and The
Photo Center NW.
Patricia Ridenour