Moodboarding is a practice that countless artists, designers, and other creatives have privately utilized for decades, and something that I’ve found to be a generative exercise. In assembling together pictures, texts, music, and other digital clippings, I can more easily tap into a general idea, mood, or theme and even discover parallels in the accumulated ephemera. It helps, too, that digital platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Are.na ensure that it’s as easy to share as it is to curate.
Jade Song, author of the forthcoming novel Chlorine, began constructing an “artistic lineage” for her book while completing the manuscript. Chlorine’s Instagram page is a scrapbook of film stills, prose passages, and art exhibits, loosely related to the feminine grotesque: painter Cecilia Vicuña’s Angel of Menstruation, a screencap from the coming-of-age body horror film Ginger Snaps, and an aqueous passage from Jackie Wang’s poetry collection.
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