Journalling Through a Wasted Youth: a FaceTime Conversation Between Ria and Harper
interview by Ria Kealey
I first came across the text-based art of Harper (otherwise knows as @ophanims) early last year while having a small crisis over wasted youth. Her work, full of childhood memories, summer dreams, and teenage vulnerability, invokes the same ache in your chest as listening to Lorde’s Pure Heroine. It’s nostalgic and desperate, glowing with the vibrance of youth and the panic of leaving it. She had me hooked. You may have since seen her collages and journal scans pop up in your instagram or tumblr feeds, or perhaps scattered throughout pinterest mood boards that remind you of teen bedrooms. We spoke over facetime about poetry, home, angels, teenagers, and all the ways they’re one.
What keeps you coming back to analogue journaling?
No matter how much I love collage and using glitter and art in general, there’s just something so therapeutic about being able to spill your guts out on a page where no one will judge you. It's really helped me work through a lot about what I know about myself through just scribbles that no one else is ever gonna read.
You often create art out of others’ words, what is it about reimagining others’ work that you like?
I‘ve been on the internet for a long time and connecting my personality to tv shows and movies was how I related to other people, so being able to make tangible proof of me liking something is like giving away a piece of my personality, like “this is me! Here’s something that I like enough to make a whole thing in my journal about!”. It helped me feel more connected to other people. I feel more connected to these authors, writers, and musicians, and reimagining others’ work has inspired me to write and use my own poetry in my collage work.
Like the fact that it exists and someone created that piece is just as inspiring as the actual work of art.
Yeah, yeah. And with my journals, having something that I can hold in my hands to show, yknow, tangible evidence of what I was doing for six months of my life, that’s cool. It satiates the magpie part of my brain to have this little collection of love poems and glitter all neat and bound.
The concept of home comes up in your poetry a lot. What is home to you?
Living in the south, there’s a lot of emphasis on family being a part of the home and that really rings true for me. Half of my life was spent in the kitchen with my mom and my grandmother and I am a shit cook, but I spent my childhood there. Being at home is like that warm feeling when you’re at the dinner table with all of your family and the dogs are underneath and you’ve got the record player going. It’s just something that I’m always going to be able to come back to. And every single one of my poems is about home and summer, so.
You use lyrics in your collages a lot, do you listen to music while you work?
Yeah I always have a soundtrack going, it’s mainly Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers, Angel Olsen, Sidney Gish. Also Car Seat Headrest and Modern Baseball, like male manipulator music I guess you could call the genre? (laughs). Like I know the guy who wrote this is probably a terrible boyfriend but he got it right! He wrote it right.
Like Cigarettes After Sex.
Yes! Like ugh please go to therapy, I am begging these men to go to therapy.
Does what you listen to depend on what you’re working on?
Definitely, like if it’s a summer piece I’ll put on like. French cool music? I don’t know how to describe it, but yeah I definitely put on stuff depending on the vibe of what I’m working on.
What’s the greatest love song?
My eight-year-old heart wants it to be a Taylor Swift song but it is 400 Lux by Lorde, no questions asked. That is the greatest love song of all time. When she says “you buy me orange juice”? Nothing is ever gonna top that for me.
I noticed a huge amount of biblical and religious imagery in your writing, especially surrounding angels. Where does that come from?
Growing up in the bible belt, Christianity is everywhere, it’s a part of every facet of my life. Like my two best friends growing up were daughters of preachers. So it kind of surrounded me, and my parents did give me a lot of freedom to choose with religion, but I was still going to vacation bible school every summer. So, a lot of my work has angel imagery because I think Catholicism is sexy but it’s kind of because I never had to interact with Catholicism? There’s a disconnect. And I’ve tried to write about the Southern Baptist Mega-Church experience, but it’s so much easier to detach from that and just write about seraphim and God-fearing men, because it’s so far from what I learned in Sunday school. Catholicism just has that drama for me.
They’ve got the aesthetic down pat.
Yes! I don’t know anything about the actual practices, but ooh stained glass windows. And the guilt! And the rosaries! That is so poetic. I love writing repressed poems and that’s perfect for it because their whole thing is being repressed. And guilt.
I wanted to talk about some specific lines from your poems.
Can you talk me through “I’m a body! I’m a body! And isn’t that enough!” (full poem pictured above)
So whenever I’m having a bad spiral or feeling like shit, to ground myself and bring myself back into myself, I kind of repeat to myself “you’re in a body, it’s done what it needs to do and kept you alive this long, and you owe it to yourself to be grateful for the fact that you’re alive and existing.” Because being a person fucking sucks sometimes, it’s this constant stream of questions, of “am I good, am I doing the right things?” but to just appreciate that you are currently alive and that your body is doing what it can to keep you living, that’s so inspiring to me! It just helps me feel better about being a person when I’m feeling really awful, to just detach myself like that. It kind of makes you enough, that you’re living and being kept alive by a creature that’s kept you living all these years, and that really helps ground me.
How about “I’m leaving every light on because I saw it in a movie once”? (full poem pictured above)
I kind of watch movies like it’s my job, I don’t know if you can see my walls or not but they’re covered in movie posters. But this line is like that warm feeling of childhood hope and love. The movies like that for me are Fantastic Mr. Fox, 13 Going on 30, and Julie and Julia. They’re directly what that line was about. My mantra is “Love will find you and it will save you”, and it’s directly coming from those movies that tell you love and family are the only things that will get you through it. And that line, “I’ll leave a light on”, is kind of a tribute to when you wake up from a nightmare when you’re scared and you’re eight, but if you leave a light on you’re suddenly safe and nothing can hurt you and your mom will bring you a glass of water and you’ll go to bed and it’ll be fine. And I don’t know, just going back to that and feeling like childhood again is just kind of what you wanna curl up and do when you’re a teenager. Leave a light on and it’s safe now and there’s no monsters.
I feel that, since graduating and moving out I’ve been going back and re-watching all of my favourites from when I was like 8 or 9. Letting myself act like a kid again without that meaning I’m childish.
It’s like a warm blanket. Oh and Paddington! How did I forget him.
Last one. “Back when I thought love was something to scratch at”. (full poem pictured above)
That line’s kind of literal, the poem itself is really sweet and it’s about this relationship in which there’s unconditional love, but love as being something to scratch at is me trying to say love as desperation, or love as having to beg for it, “it” being care and attention. You know when you have a bug bite and you can press it with your nail and make a cross and it doesn’t itch anymore? Or when your mom tells you to cut your nails so you don’t scratch at it anymore? That’s like the catharsis, the moment when you don’t have to beg for it anymore, that jump into being completely loved for who you are and not having to be desperate for that attention.