Cyanotype on cotton rag paper
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.