This work is interactive! Download the Polaroid Originals app and scan Rowan’s images to experience her work in augmented reality.

A Pocketful of Posies is Rowan’s first work specifically for the digital environment. It’s always been imperative to be able to touch and feel the materials Rowan works with, and the tangible tactile nature of the resulting object is what they find most accessible about art making.

By considering a digital screen as the frame for this work – and the webpage it is housed on another frame – the viewer is further removed from experiencing it as one would in a physical space.

This limitation had Rowan considering how distance can be exploited to change or enhance perception- and how seeing things from new perspectives results in interrogation without normal frames of reference.

Rowan started with a small field of tiny overlapping hand-embroidered French knots, bullion stitches, and seed stitch. Through a microscope these were transformed into a strange, alien, fluffy, seaweed-ish noise, and unpicking the stitches revealed more of the criss-cross weave of the fabric. The series shows what could be seen under the scope of the remaining thread fibres while unpicked to the naked eye. Also revealed in the last two images is the damage to the underlying fabric caused by the process of stitching and un-stitching.

Text has been a constituent feature of almost all of Rowan’s works, but for this, words were the way into understanding what to explore and provided answers to some of the decisions that needed to be made.

Names given to shades of emulsion paint were chosen for their connotations with Rowan’s experience of the last eighteen months, and their corresponding colours determined the colours of thread used for the stitches. By exploring the words of the names first, Rowan was conscious of the ideas the name of the colours had engendered while stitching, and as a result sewing (and then removing, mostly) with the threads of their experience of the pandemic. ‘A Pocketful of Posies’ is a blush red colour, and a reference to the apocryphal association with the Black Death and its transmission.

The microscopic images were printed onto Polaroid emulsion film and video is embedded into the prints accessible with the free Polaroid Originals app. The augmented reality viewer feature recognises the information stored in the prints and the embedded content will play after a few seconds.

When using the Polaroid Originals app…

Open the app and scroll sideways on the bottom menu to “AR Viewer.” Tap on the icon and hold your phone over the photo so that it fits in the frame marked on the screen. The app will say it is scanning and then loading the AR media when it recognises the photo. 

If you find that it isn’t recognising the image, make sure there aren’t any reflections on the screen you’re scanning, try moving your phone nearer or further away from the screen or making the image larger.

“A feeling has been bubbling up inside me – that the social isolation I’ve experienced throughout the pandemic will not end when the world opens back up. I’ll stay in my little bubble due to some combination of architectural inaccessibility, health concerns, or the ableist social organisation.

The bubbles in the “o” of FOMO (fear of missing out) returned abruptly. I’m watching hot girl summer through a soapy phone screen on my mom’s couch. The celebratory shots to shots of packed clubs are a reminder of how difficult it is for me to access these spaces. And access desire. I, too, want queer joy.”

Whether looking in or looking out, the bubble can create certain optical amplifications and distortions. It can cause a flattening of the exterior, a contraction of worlds, membranes of separation, voyeuristic snow globe fish tanks, safety within a shared ecosystem of values, feedback loops of the same breath exhaled and inhaled and exhaled and inhaled.

“My own personal bubble can make me feel so unseen in the dark and yet so magnified when I venture out drenched in the gaze.

Things are always bubbling up.

Some days my only liquid is bubble water and champagne, 

but unfortunately I’ll never have a bubble butt. 

Bubbles are what form between my hands as I vigorously lather with soap until they pop on the raw dry skin cracked from repetitious cleaning.

Or what I imagine a child blowing in the sunny park I imagine myself sitting in when I imagine getting out more. 

Or the ones that dance over the purple LED glow of the electric tea kettle. 

Or academia.

Or the musical ones that form in my body. 

Or algorithmically engineered echo-chambers.

Or the ones that are feelings that rise in my chest.

Or the ones that are suspended inside my bottle of hand sanitiser. 

Or “bubble mate” love in the time of bubbles. 

Or lips blowing bubble kisses.”

Anti-bubbles are formed when a droplet of liquid becomes totally surrounded by a thin membrane of gas within a body of fluid. Natalee watched a video of a Youtube scientist create anti-bubbles in beakers of soapy water. They added food colouring, so that when the anti-bubble popped, a smooth explosion of colour swirled to dissolution. 

“I want to pop swirl turn this isolation, and every feeling I have, inside out to crisp in the sun.”