We had the honor to interview Ben Herr, a graduating BFA student, about his final project GET MEDICATED and further understand the process and thoughts behind the project. This interview was unscripted with minor editing.
Ben’s artist statement:
GET MEDICATED addresses the internal struggle of neurodivergent individuals to medicate their disabilities. Using cyanotype light sensitive solution, this installation features 108 framed prints of treated photo paper showing assorted compositions of sea-glass, combined with three treated fabric exposures featuring cracked bottles and other damaged glass vessels, creating an overwhelmingly blue installation against the wall of the gallery.
With this project I am exploring the origins of cyanotype in my own way, just as one of the founding mothers of cyanotype Anna Atkins did in 1853 with her experiments documenting species of botanical sea life, translated via cyanotype impressions onto treated papers. In contrast, my cyanotype works often take the form of messy jumbled-up environments to reflect my experience as an individual with a neurodivergent brain, and the internal struggles that come in tow with navigating higher education with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). With the combination of fabric exposures and framed cyanotype photograms featuring handfuls of once sharp shards of sea-glass, I relate the stigma associated with discarded hazardous material with the experience of neurodivergent individuals. GET MEDICATED gives validation to the internal pressure on afflicted individuals to assimilate to their neurotypical peers by way of medication. Tumbled naturally by the tides, shards of glass assume a new form with friendlier edges; reformed by their unrelenting tumultuous environment. The dependence on medication to treat the effects of ADHD, while helpful in theory, can contribute to existing feelings of being damaged or a less adequate version of oneself while unmedicated.
Cyanotype is my chosen medium for this work in part because of its ability to beautifully translate shards of glass onto paper, and also because of the calming aura that the cyan coloration imbues on the viewers. The aesthetic of hazardous material floating aimlessly in a deep blue space conveys a sense of freedom from expectation and acts as desired release from pent-up frustration.
As a small key, questions that were asked relating to the main question or off of Ben’s answers are presented in Bold.
What does this project mean to you and is there any particular meaning to an individual part?
All the images contribute to the same idea that I’m going for. GET MEDICATED is my reflection of my own experience going through college/higher education with the learning disability ADHD, and they’re all representation of how I felt inside during my whole pursuit of higher education.
Is that both the photo images as well as the larger cloth pieces?
Yeah, they’re both meant to be seen in tandem with each other
Do you have a favorite part of this project? Either during the process or the finished work.
I love both parts of making them, the muslin fabric and the contact prints. But I think I had the most fun making the muslin fabrics because it forced me to go outside in the sun and people would ask me what I was doing and I would be able to tell them I’m working on my big project.
What drew you to the theme of medication, what were you hoping to achieve?
So the medication part of the project is something I wanted to spearhead through my photos because it’s something I’ve had to come to terms with later in my college career, and it was kind of a choice that I had to make that I wasn’t entirely happy with; treating my own disability. So I wanted to reflect that struggle with this project. What drew me to it was just the requirements of my major.
Like the BFA project itself?
Well, getting into the BFA you have to have a certain GPA and I was not doing great before medication and the medicated part of the project is me telling that story.
So kind of like explaining that during the pursuit of getting into the BFA that you had to get medicated and further exploring that?
Yes, exactly.
Do you think with this finished product that you got, you achieved that goal of showing that theme?
I think it feels really resolved, yeah.
You kind of answered our question of how did you come up with the idea for this project, maybe you could elaborate on the mediums and coming up with the idea of the tapestries displayed next to the other cyanotype?
In the BFA program, it’s made known to all the students that we are going to have a place in the big Western Gallery and the Western Gallery is a very big space, so we’re expected to fill a large chunk of it. So we were warned very early to start thinking big! For painters, that meant bigger paintings, larger scale, and for other mediums it was ‘well, figure out something that takes up space.’ So during that time I was just playing around with fabrics and I knew I wanted it to be a part of my project, because otherwise, you can only make so many 8×10 squares of pictures of cyanotypes, so I knew I needed another element to what I was making. So we have the larger-scale tapestries.
Did you plan for this project to end up as it is now? What did this project look like in the beginning concept stages and is it similar or different from your finished project?
Through the program, we have a whole bunch of critiques, and I can say that my project changed dramatically through every critique. There’s a ton of stuff that you think of at the beginning of the year, and as it progresses you have to figure out what’s working, what’s not working. The finished product of the project is something I’m really happy with, but definitely something I didn’t entirely envision until the final weeks leading up to the exhibition. There was a lot of finagling that went on.
What was it looking like at the beginning?
I wanted something very big. What I wanted initially was five giant frames of cyanotype paper, professionally framed, matted, made to look fancy and everything. That was my plan going into it, but I was banking on funding through a grant and then that grant ended up not being granted to me. So I came up with something new and entirely my own.
What drew you to the imagery of broken glass specifically? What was the process behind capturing the broken glass in cyanotype?
Glass is everywhere, it was definitely a theme that I kept throughout the whole program, I was always playing around with it because I have this thing where I struggle to throw away sometimes that I can find uses for. I have a whole bunch of wine bottles leftover. I cut them a lot to try to make drinking glasses, so they’ve always been around. The idea behind the glass is it always gets broken, and glass becomes very different when broken. People view it in an entirely different way and I think it spoke to the concepts I was working with.
What was it like capturing glass in cyanotype? Was it at all different from other cyanotype?
Oh, it was a big process of learning how to capture it successfully because when you’re placing stuff under ultraviolet light, the big thing that makes it readable through the light sensitive paper is how much light is getting blocked. So when you’re putting something under it that’s clear and almost all the light is getting captured, it’s very hard to capture something that’s see-through with ultraviolet light.
How did you do it?
Trial and error, failing a bunch of times and then one out of the ten tries is successful.
Were the objects you broke to get the pieces of glass of importance to you? Is there a portion of this project that is found-objects?
Yeah, the project is actually split between that. A whole bunch of the contact prints that are up are of sea glass and all that sea glass was found. I went and scooped it up from one of the beaches in Bellingham called Glass Beach. It’s a beach at the very edge of town by the waterfront. It used to be a landfill I believe? And now it is just a whole bunch of industrial materials scattered along the rocks and there’s so much glass there. I collected like three hefty bags of glass and there’s still so much more. The other portion of it were some bottles that I had lying around and I broke. Just playing around with seeing how it differed from how sea glass came out through cyan.
With the larger tapestries, you have more solid glass pieces, did you do glass cutting for some of those?
Oh yeah, there’s one tapestry in particular, the wine glasses cut in half. That was among the first ones that had I cut myself. It’s a very finicky process to cut glass cleanly – lots of risk involved
What was the intention of the placement for the picture frames and the split color used inside the negative space? Walk us through the process of you setting up the project in the exhibition space.
In the studios that are provided by the school for us to focus on our work essentially, we got little office spaces where we could hang stuff up and ponder our own visualizations for the project, in my studio, there were painted walls, a deep dark blue, which I really was in love with. It is very similar to the paint that’s on the wall of the gallery now, it’s called Salty Dog. That color of blue. It’s very nice.
You also split the negative space down the middle to make it look like a pill, was that something you decided on a couple weeks ago?
It actually wasn’t decided on until the day that I had to paint the wall. All my best ideas come out the day I’m supposed to turn something in, so it’s just par for the course for my brain.
Is there anything about your process that you want to talk about?
I kind of used two different processes for this whole project. For the big fabrics, I had to use the sun because we, at this school, don’t have a lightbox big enough to fit a 10 foot long cloth. So I had to do some creative problem solving for that. For the others, I actually gathered my own light source. So I bought screen printing lights to set up my studio space to create work because the lightbox here, while it’s great and functional, it’s not able to capture the deep dark blue color that I was looking for.
Do you find any changes in your emotions/view of the project? Like so done with the project one week, but then hyped about it next?
I think everyone in the program was very stressed in the month leading up to installation. In the studios, if you were there while I was working, you would just see a closed door and a bunch of glass clanging against each other because I was working frantically to put them all on paper.
What do you want an audience to take away from this project?
This project to me is very much an outlet for my own experience, my own frustration with the obstacles that exist in my life. So knowing that, I know not everyone struggles with the same things I do, but my hope is that someone can look at my project and relate to it in some way to the obstacles that may exist in their life. I’m just hoping for a little bit of relatability.
You kind of answered this already, but what drew you to working with cyanotype?
I’m definitely a fan of the color blue. But more than that, the color blue has a lot of significance in history and with humans. I remember seeing a factoid once about how the president always wears navy blue because it’s a very calming color. Inherently there’s this effect of blue to have this calming aesthetic to it, and that’s something we all strive for, to feel calm and zen.
What was the biggest challenge when creating this project?
The biggest challenge is planning for it, because the whole program is structured in this way where you plan out a project months in advance and then you create a plan for how to execute all the individual parts with their individual deadlines, but that’s not how my brain works. So I think that was the hardest part, just figuring out how to plan something and follow through with it.
If you were to recreate the project’s expectations/rules how would you go about making it work better for you?
I think I kind of did? As much as I tried to make myself do things the ‘normal’ way and the ‘right’ way, I can’t help but do things my own way anyways. I created so many plans for how this project was going to turn out, but I didn’t end up going with any of them and ended up with the one I ended up with.
If I could do it differently, I would probably set more deadlines for myself. Deadlines are the things we all run away from.
Who or what are your biggest artistic influences, and if you have any specific influences, feel free to share.
Part of the requirements of the program are to do research on other artists to gain inspiration. Robin Hill made these awesome pictures of snowflakes in cyanotype, and she uses this awesome grid format. She was working with people in the science department to create these images of snowflakes and put them in cyan. Cyanotype is an alternative process, it’s very niche, it’s very individual, just like a snowflake. So that’s a project that really captured my attention in the alternative space.
There’s also Meghann Riepenhoff who did the same thing that I did, essentially, which was processing big large pieces of fabric in the ocean. Cyanotype is able to be processed by acidified water and salt water does just that. It is a little bit polluting, a tiny bit, but it’s much less polluting than the traditional silver gelatin process.
Where did you find inspiration and what motivates you to create?
Inspiration is hard because at this school, there aren’t many big art events you can attend. There’s the art walk every other month, but it’s the same studios over and over. Bellingham is a very small town, so inspiration’s very much internal, I would say. For me, a bunch of that is just struggling to navigate the systems in place, so that was kind of my inspiration throughout the whole year, just struggling.
Were you inspired by the struggle with the project or struggle with academia and ADHD?
Both. It’s mostly the whole choice to get medicated, because that’s been a part of my life ever since I was young. Hating this pill that makes me better at everything.
I’m also very inspired by people in my same vicinity doing great things. It’s weird because everyone whose doing stuff in the art world seems like a superhero with the amount of stuff they do. I wanted to pursue cyanotype mostly because of Chloe Dichter, another BFA student in the past two years.
Were you in school while she was making her project and you went “I want to do that.”
Yeah! Actually the first year of college, I believe in 2017 or 2018 Chloe and I had a photo class together. We also did the Alternative Photography class in the summer together, but that was online.
How were online classes for you?
I think it was very nice at first, and then it got to be very troublesome. I had a number of things I was dealing with back then, and the whole pandemic didn’t make those things better. It was definitely a cool experiment I would say.
Was it hard for art classes specifically?
It was, mostly because I was doing foundation classes at that point. You know, the drawing classes. We were told to look up pictures of models online and then just draw, without really being taught the techniques in person. My drawings were not good.
How have you grown as an artist from when you were first starting out to the present day?
I think the biggest glow-up for me is confidence, self-confidence. That was always the biggest thing for me, everyone looks like they’re doing so much and back then, I was just in awe of it and I thought I could never do the same things that awesome creative people are doing because I can’t draw very well. Now I’ve learned so much more about how you don’t have to draw ‘good,’ you can just do your own thing and be happy with it.
How has the BFA major been for you?
It has been a journey. It’s been really good though, since I’m a fifth year, a lot of my friends have moved on to do their own thing in life and left this school, and the BFA program kind of forces you to make friends with each other. We go through trials together. It’s been really fun, and it’s sad it’s coming to an end so soon.
Where do you intend to go as an artist after you graduate?
I definitely want to do more shows, because that’s always so exciting and it’s an opportunity to take a look at your own work without the constant stress of “what am I making, what am I making, what am I making,” “Is it good?” Also, in group shows especially, you get to see so much awesome stuff created by your peers and that can just spur your own ideas and your own path. I’m not exactly sure where my path is going, but I definitely know the direction I want it to go, which is to collaborate with more people and participate in more art things..
Have you considered selling these photos or do you plan to present this projects at other shows/places?
It’s hard with Bellingham, because coffee shops are basically your best chance to push your artwork out there. I’m not sure I can push my whole installation at the Western Gallery to a coffee shop, that’d be awesome if that were to happen. You know, reach out to me (laughter from us).
But in terms of selling, I don’t know. I’m toying around with the idea, I’m in the middle of drafting certificates of authenticity for each and every one of them, and I do plan on selling them to my closest friends and peers upon graduation so everyone has a little piece to remember me by. I will be selling them, though.
Hey, if anyone’s reading currently…
If anyone wants one, feel free to reach out to me.
After completing all prepared questions, we asked some that we thought about in the moment.
Were there any other ideas you had in mind? Back when you were brainstorming.
I definitely did, let me try to remember…
Oh! I had this idea of wanting to escape the wall. I wanted to do an installation but I wanted to have it off the wall at some point and I wanted to hang those tapestries by these little chandelier holders, but the thing with chandelier holders is that they’re in a circle, it’s hard to view something when it’s stretching around and it just wouldn’t work out. I would have to go very abstract to get that. I also wanted to put the silhouettes of glass on fabric, but I found out very quickly that’s harder to do.
You’re thinking of putting this up on your website soon, is there anything else that people could look forward to seeing from you on your website? Why do you think someone should visit your website?
To see what I’m up to, see what kinds of things I can create. If you’re a curator looking for artists who are still very much rooted in the traditional art making, I am that person. It’s really hard with photography these days because there’s so much imagery everywhere online. So I think the future is going to look more filtered in terms of art to human-made things.
What do you mean? Traditional aspects will be more valued? Since we live in a image-and-sound based era and moving away from text-based. So as a visual media artist, do you think that traditional aspects of capturing images will be valued more?
Yeah, I think there’s definitely going to be a resurgence of traditional, hand-made arts because of all the things going on right now with AI and the whole copyright issue.
Is there anything else you want to draw attention to? Process, artwork, anything.
I do want to shout out Grace Dunbar-Miller for creating a really awesome poem that was inspired by my work.
Speaking of that poem, were there instructions about this? Since it seems like all the pieces in the gallery had some writing for them as well.
We had individual meetings with the writers. We were told to get our ideas together into one elevator pitch and present the work to them, and there was a lot of connection that Grace had to my work and I thought that was awesome because we had similar ideas and both communicating them through our process. I thought that was an awesome thing and an awesome idea by the program.
What was the reason behind the capitalization?
It’s commanding when you read something in caps, and my whole getting medicated idea was very much confronting that I had to change my own feelings about medicating myself for my own disability. Because at the end of the day, it’s something that helps me and it was a tough pill to swallow.
Anything you’d like to say?
Take more photos and don’t be afraid to show them off.
Just after the interview was concluded, we chatted and brought up Ben’s process for painting the picture frames, where he shared that the frames are spray painted black on top of primer which is to represent masking.
For those that don’t know, masking is something that many neurodivergent people do in order to better fit in with others. It is described as changing one’s behavior to cover up a part of themself to avoid seeming too different or incompatible with others. (VerywellMind)
If you wish to view Ben’s other works, visit his website.
If you’d like to see GET MEDICATED, we highly recommend visiting Western’s Main Gallery! However, here is a digital collection of the piece.
