Artist, Eileen Quinlan: Hello. I'm Eileen Quinlan. I created this work by pinning a yoga mat directly to the wall, and sculpting it and moving it in different ways to try to reference a body. I lit the yoga mat with my strobes and photographed it with 4x5" film.
I was thinking about lifestyle and I was thinking about class when I was creating this work. I'm not trying to undermine or be critical of yoga necessarily. It reflects a particular kind of lifestyle, or reflects a certain amount of privilege.
The film I use is an outdated Polaroid product. Polaroid actually embeds chemistry into the packet of film that goes into the back of the camera. The interruptions in the image that you see are caused by manipulating the chemistry in the four by five film packet. I actually press on the chemistry packet in the film with my hands, and break that packet so that parts of the film don't develop properly.
So there's a very controlled aspect of the production of the image, and then there's a somewhat uncontrolled and unpredictable aspect that comes with allowing it to develop in this way.
I worked for a photographer who photographed makeup for Clinique. And he was a huge influence on me a lot of the things that I do in the studio, I learned by working with him, and learning about how to use gels, how to sculpt light with different materials, or creating these kinds of situations where very small objects could be lit in very specific ways. So using commercial training in a non-commercial setting is something that's always been important to me.