Behind 'Knees Burn Green' Photo Book

☆ By Martina Taylor ☆

IT’S A LITTLE MORE THAN IRONIC WHEN A BOOK ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS FOSTERS A NEW ONE. This is the story of artists Isabella Preisz and Michaela Perau, and how their friendship birthed a symbiotic work of art. What started as a fated phone call between two strangers and one’s shared manuscript became Preisz’s book Hours Inside Out and Perau’s Knees Burn Green. The former, a book of poetry, and the latter of photography, work in tandem to map the cyclical nature of relationships, growth, and inevitable decay. Preisz’s carefully crafted words sparked carefully crafted photos by Perau. Inspired by the collaborative nature of this project, in addition to asking both artists some questions we had Preisz and Perau ask one another questions about their work as well. Read below to learn more about their respective works, friendship and collaboration.

LUNA: Can you share a bit about how you both met and how this project was sparked?

PREISZ: Michaela & I met through our good friend Sophie! We were put in contact with each other because I saw her photography & was utterly MOVED. I knew I had to work with her. From the moment we spoke on the phone, we were musing out. I told her about my upcoming manuscript & asked if she would be interested in doing a collaborative photography project with the poems. From there, she hit the ground running.

PERAU: Isabella and I met through The Luna Collective and after being digitally introduced through Sophie. We spoke over the phone as I was living in Brooklyn and Isabella was in California at the time. Within ten minutes we clicked and started to brainstorm creative to go along with the release of Isabella’s book. She gave me full reign to interpret the words in a way that was meaningful to me and after reading the manuscript I came up with the concept of Polaroids of a singular vase of flowers in shifting conditions of light as well as the cycle of their physical life (blossom, growth, decay) over a two week period. Metaphorically I have always been tied to the traditional concept of flowers and romance. I was drawn very much to the relationships that Isabella created in her manuscript and how she dealt with concepts of metamorphosis through relationships be it romantic or otherwise. My goal was to capture that ephemeral nature in the beauty of those feelings and the beauty of transience.

LUNA: How has quarantine impacted your creative process?

PERAU: I truthfully feel that I have never been more creative and inspired than I am during this time. I think mostly it has to do with the fact that the entire world has slowed down and there is less of this expectation to turn out work or shoot ten projects in order to feel successful. I feel like I have newfound peace in the time that we have been given to be really introspective. For my own creativity I need to be able to feel calm and at peace. I feel like I have been able to take projects slowly and do them correctly because I have all this time to focus on it now. This book is a real reflection of that time and process of introspection.

PREISZ: Holy moly, yes. Quarantine has completely changed how I spend time with myself. I have to be so much more intentional about how & when I choose to relax, let go, and write. Because I spend so much more time in my space now, I have to know when to shift the energy. It has been very trying, but I think with time the adjustment will be much easier to manage.

LUNA: What value has collaboration had in your career?

PREISZ: Exponential. I have no idea where I would be without the help, guidance, & support of my peers. My first book cover was co-designed with an artist I knew at the time. My second book was a product of meeting someone at a party — Rhiannon McGavin — who later turned out to be my dear friend & copy-editor. I can’t think of any career move I’ve made & not remember the guidance of someone I both respected & considered a good friend.

PERAU: I am such an independent person in every other aspect of my life and in the beginning of my career creatively I always fought asking for help or trying to work with others because I thought in some strange way it was like admitting defeat and not being able to do it on my own. Looking back I have to laugh because nearly every project I have done would have been impossible without the help and collaboration of others. Specifically in quarantine I was able to conceptualize and create three separate projects, a music video, a book, and a short film all because of three spectacularly talented women who reached out to collaborate. As creatives I think it is so important to collaborate and bounce ideas off of one another especially if you already share similar aesthetic or narratives. Collaboration is really the only way we have as creatives to check our otherwise entirely mentally contained perception and illusion of an idea.

PERAU: What prompted you to write hours inside out? When did you start conceptualizing it?

PREISZ: I believe my own experience of time promoted the manuscript. I was in my junior year of college and stepping into my ability to articulate myself as a writer. As I was experiencing the world as an artist, I was also reliving my past through my poems. It was through creating this magical, symbiotic relationship between inventing my own, new world while reliving images, scents, and tickles from the past that I came to discover that I was writing a book.

PERAU: Many of the poems address questions of non-traditional and varied relationships, how did you pick relationships or certain stories to share and not?

PREISZ: To be honest, I believe the stories, relationships, and memories that I write about pick me. While writing this manuscript, I would approach my journal with a non-judgmental headspace & just allow the material to flow out of me. Whenever I would stop & think... hmm, is that going in a weird direction? The answer was usually yes. And, that meant, I had to keep going. Because that meant I was onto something “good” so to speak.

PERAU: What makes a relationship important or consequential to you?

PREISZ: How much you are changed by the words or actions of someone.

PERAU: Was there any one relationship romantic or otherwise that drove your manuscript?

PREISZ: Yes. I started seeing someone about two months after I graduated college & one month before I was supposed to leave for Scotland for two months. We talked the entire summer — FaceTiming in the little moments we had throughout our day… whenever the time difference would match up. But, when I got home, things fizzled out. I believe this desire to be with someone while I was writing 1,000s of miles away—a feeling I had never, ever experienced in my life, truly shaped the manuscript with this undercurrent of unnamed desire. Mostly because I knew in the back of my head that this was all we were ever going to be—two people, just missing each other. Looking back, I think the feeling of longing for this undefined love was very moving for me. I had to let go of it and indoing so—I let go of this narrative I created with him while writing the book. It was insanely cathartic.

PERAU: There is a lot of vulnerability in your writing and re-telling of trauma. Do you find writing to help heal through trauma or is there a more cathartic release as you are writing that is perhaps more unintentional?

PREISZ: I would say both. Writing has helped me navigate a lot of uncertainty. If I don’t know how to name an emotion, I grab my journal. This has helped me find the words to give shape to my experience. So writing has not only become an essential form of artistic expression—where healing can unintentionally run free from shape—but it has also served as a constructive way to work through my mental health with words.

PREISZ: Tell me more about your creative process while translating the written words of "hours inside out" into visual images.

PERAU: When Isabella first sent me her manuscript I was immediately taken by the vulnerability of her stories. She gave me such freedom with those stories and I wanted to take that very seriously. I gave the manuscript three or four passes in its entirety. As I read I annotated feelings it evoked, memories it brought up, traumas, etc. I also pulled words or sentences that gave me strong feelings or honestly were so beautifully written that I couldn’t ignore them. Once I had my annotated notes and lists of these words and stanzas I worked to pull them together. At this time, I was dying to work with Polaroids, which was a happy coincidence for the project. I wanted to document these feelings in some sort of chronology because the manuscript read chronologically to me as snippets of time, stories of one’s life taken in snapshots. The stories that resonated heavily with me were those written about relationships. As a classic trope of romanticism and relationships flowers immediately came to mind.

PREISZ: Are there any themes that you believe that are central to your work? If so, why do you think that you return to them?

PERAU: I think that there are, absolutely yes but more importantly I find my work to be very reflective and critical of the world around me which holds true more often than certain themes. When I am starting a project, or conceptualizing a shoot I have to find some sort of meaning in what I am doing, some story that I am trying to tell about the world around me or person in front of me. I think that is why I am so drawn to filmmaking lately. Because the story comes very naturally in that medium.

PREISZ: What did creating Knees Burn Green teach you? Do you have any advice for creatives who are trying to turn their visual images into solidified representations—such as a book or a zine?

PERAU: Self-publishing this book was one of the most difficult things that I have done thus far with my work, mostly due to the state of our world right now. I got to know myself and my process very well because I had so much time on my hands and watched myself fight to keep productive, keep formatting, keep re-working and scanning images, etc. My advice would be, absolutely fucking do it. Do it really well. I learned throughout this process that I am an insane perfectionist and I couldn’t be more grateful for that right now. I belabored over every little detail of this book and I think that you can feel that in the final product. Never be afraid to invest time and money in to yourself and your work. If you believe in it others will too.

PREISZ: Because Knees Burn Green deals with the cyclical nature of blossoming & inevitably decaying—how do you feel this portrayal of time relates to the world we are experiencing today? Was this perspective a result of what you have witnessed during 2020 or has it been a theme you have been observing for some time now?

PERAU: I think that now more than ever I am aware of this relationship and of change. Ultimately if you really want to boil it down that is what this book is about. The world around us is entirely centrifuged around change and yet we scramble on the outside of its orbit to grab on to things that bring stillness and normalcy until we are ultimately catapulted back out. In our present, we are dealing with this in a more rapid succession and I think that it has made me that much more aware of how normal we all thought everything was and how so much needed to change. When we think that we have achieved normalcy or accept our circumstances I think it takes this type of alarming upheaval to dial us back in to what real and accomplished contentment looks like for us as a societal whole. A lot of our world felt normal but was so desperately needing to be uprooted and critiqued.

PREISZ: How does light, time, and perspective shift play into the idea of “the nearly missed” or the "in between” of transient things?

PERAU: This idea is something that I am entirely fascinated with since studying more traditionally the mechanisms of photography. I constantly fight my inner perfectionist to snap a photo at the “right” time and because of it feel that I have actually and physically missed a moment. I don’t know if I am the only one that finds this so incredibly compelling but it has become something I think about often in my work. In this project, I kept many independent and unchanged variables so that these three factors could really shine. The subject as a whole stayed unchanged by my physical interference and yet morphed by these other factors. My interference came in a more subliminal and less physical manner as I attempted to capture a different beauty with each new day and Polaroid. The flowers changed before me without any sort of adjustments and throughout the process illustrated these themes and my yearning for preserving the transience of the being.

LUNA: I know a lot is up in the air, but what's next for you both?

PREISZ: I’d really love to explore all of my creative passions. I’ve always loved photography so I am trying to learn & experiment more with that medium. Also, I am thinking about launching a podcast in 2021— centered around young creatives & how they are being impacted by the world we are navigating today. And my sisters & I just started a jewelry line called “Sofie & Celine” which has been so fun to create from the ground up. Honestly, I just want to be limitless in my experiences & try it all.

PERAU: I have fallen so in love over quarantine with film making. Up next for me is a short film, I have no idea what about yet but I know I want it to be Black and White and entirely conceptual to feed that side of my brain. I tend to reign my ideas in with questions of feasibility. I want to create something really different stylistically and let myself think really outside of the box.