I’m interested disrupting the surface of the photograph, of revealing not only the subject at hand, but also the process by which it was made. The light that makes the image also removes the legibility of the subject. The cyanotype works create voids like rays of light penetrating through the surface of water and directing themselves to the depths of the ocean. Crepuscular rays are generated by a photocopier – by distancing the object on the glass thereby appearing black where the image recedes and generating a strip of light where the book came into closer contact with the glass of the photocopying machine. The negatives for this work echo this production process: mechanical preproduction, uniqueness and chance – the images were made without weighing down the negative on the sensitized paper – they instead moved during exposure, blew away and were repositioned. The subject of this work refers back to – conceptually and physically –the de-installation process of a previous work, Apparent Distance (2019). This work’s subject and materiality references an underwater rock formation, imbued with myth and unable to be fixed. Using a set of 26 negatives of fragments and sections of fallen and folded textile from my 2019 installation, the pictorial essence of the image is lost, this work attempts to signal to photography’s elasticity, the precarity of the site, the experience of diving and the way that I play with folding back and forth between my own archive in my studio processes.

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that uses sunlight and iron salt solutions to fix the silhouette of an object placed onto photosensitive paper. These were first employed to reproduce notes, diagrams and botanical studies and are recognisable for their Prussian blue colour and tonal variation.

26 variations from Blue spectrum and descent brings together 26 unique cyanotypes made in response to Pluta’s installation Apparent Distance 2019 depicting the ancient Yonaguni rock formation in Japan. The work uses fragments and sections from the installation, as it was being dismantled, to signal photography’s elasticity, the precarity of the underwater site, and the folding back and forth of archival imagery in Pluta’s studio practice.