Lightning Fairy Circle: For Terri Windling
Fall, 2000
Excerpts from Stu Jenks’ book:
Hoop Dancing: More Journeys Through Nocturnal Photography.
Fezziwig Press: 2009. (Story edited in 2019)
In 2000, I was just another artistic bozo on the bus. Still am a clown today, but back then, I was just an unknown guy with an fine art degree, printing 16 x 20 inch prints in the Toole Shed’s darkroom in downtown Tucson, Arizona.
If you print your own photographs in a chemical darkroom, you have a lot of work prints that are just this side of being right. Not good enough to sell, but pretty to look at nonetheless. I usually placed the throwaways on the bottom drying screen in the darkroom, with all the other test strips and crappy prints or I just put in a box somewhere. By the year 2000, I had a boat load of prints that didn’t pass muster.
One night, I decided to thumbtack a purpler version of the above photograph on the wall of the Toole Shed’s East End bathroom, just to pretty it up a little. A few days later, Terri Winding, artist, writer, editor and all around wonderful person, who unknown to me had a studio across the hall, saw the print and loved it. She asked James Graham, the King of the Toole Shed at the time, who shot it. He said Stu Jenks did.
And the rest is history.
Really. That print, in that bathroom, changed everything.
When I had a one-man show in the MOCA basement at the West End of the Toole Shed in 2001, Terri brought down Mary Ann, Karen and the two Charles to see it, when the four of them were visiting from back east. My circle installation ended up being the backdrop for a scene in Charles De Lint’s book, Medicine Road, and Charles Vess and Karen Shaffer invited me to take the alfalfa and Christmas lights on the road to the Mythic Journeys Conference in Atlanta in 2002. Then things took off, with new friends and new patrons, buying and showing my work from as far and wide as Georgia, North Carolina, California, New York, Michigan, Canada, Great Britain and the Highlands of Scotland.
All because I put up a flawed photograph of a circle of light with monsoon lightning in the distance on a art warehouse bathroom wall in Tucson, Arizona.
Oh, and what is more important? That Terri Windling saw the image, liked it, liked me and did what she has done for many people over the years.
She helped.
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