It was in working for another artist that I began to understand what kind of environment I wanted to make work in. We would spend most of the day setting up and making moulds, which involved a lot of preparation, and at the end of the day we would pour into the mould and leave it to set overnight. The next morning was about discovering what all of that had condensed into, seeing all those gestures and decisions in one moment, as a single gesture. Producing an artwork in this way always felt like discovering it, rather than creating it. This relationship with something that came from you, yet relating to it as something outside of yourself, it felt exciting to me–perhaps because it is more realistic, in that anything you make has many unseen collaborators.
When I turned my studio into a darkroom I didn’t have images I wanted to print, I didn’t own a camera at the time, my interest was in the environment itself–a making space that is sensory and reciprocal, its influence upon you is equal to your influence upon it. I spent a long time working only with light and chemistry. I feel I have a lot more agency there than when looking through a viewfinder. The parameters you deal with in a photographic darkroom are inherently resistant to regulation; light, temperature, time, this makes it very unpredictable and disobedient. It will often take me a whole day to produce a single image, and rarely does it come out how I intended. I make the photographs in a print drum to protect them from light, taking them out of the dark and into the light feels like that condensed moment of discovery I described. In this context my authorship over the images feels thinner, and that to me is interesting.
There’s a great text by Jeff Wall called Liquid Intelligence where he talks about the essential role water plays in making photographs. For him it represents an archaism. He connects these wet processes to the past and time, saying that they embody “a memory-trace of very ancient production-processes of washing, bleaching, dissolving.” This resonated with me and fed my interest in photography on a material level–exploring the organic, vegetable and mineral world of the medium. I find it intriguing that we still use animal by-products to make analogue paper and film.
So many of the materials and processes associated with photography seem ritualistic to me, and looking at the early pioneers such as Henry Fox Talbot only deepens that. The difference is that I could print images perfectly and accurately, but choose to allow slippages and errors by cultivating an imperfect practice, so I guess that choice is the difference. I’ve made it very difficult to do exactly what I want to do when making images, I only know that I enjoy that resistance and when the translation becomes too direct I lose interest. All of these conditions apply to anyone operating a darkroom, I only choose to amplify them in order to become more uninhibited, more automatic.
I always want to extend this period where the image feels malleable, often with photography the viewfinder and camera controls are what give you that sense of input and once the shutter goes everything becomes past tense. It feels harder to exercise any influence. My approach to the darkroom and to printing stretches that workable state, and introducing different substrates like plywood and aluminium brings it closer to collage, stretching it further.
I worked mostly in sculpture before coming to photography, so it feels natural to keep a hand in both. Returning to objects after working with images, I felt I had licence to make sculptures that I didn’t before, a new language felt accessible. In looking at recent sculpture, there is a tendency toward medium and contents; for a show in January at Roland Ross I filled a cast iron radiator with helium. I wanted to impose a habit on an object, so that it was at odds with its surroundings. A cast iron radiator is perfect because it’s naturally air tight, so I attached my own fixings and filled it with helium gas–this imbalance with the room’s atmospheric density created an unseen tension. Although it is as much about the space outside the radiator as the space inside, the tension only exists as a result of both meeting. Presumably it became lighter, but we never weighed it. There are also things I want to say that images can’t do sufficiently, just as there are deficiencies I’ve found in object making. To summarise, I feel like I need both to be happy.
Initially the glass ampoules contained what was readily available, the chemistry and paraphernalia of a darkroom. I paired the sealed ampoules with hand-silvered glass tubes, a chemical process that utilises silver nitrate, which is also what makes paper or film light sensitive. I was interested in silver and its innate ability to reproduce the world, through photographic reproduction, and through a reflection in creating a mirrored surface. To me they feel optical, depending on the opacity of the liquid it will cast an image on the wall behind where it’s hung; it’s very different seeing the colour of rainwater, champagne or anaesthetic when illuminated like that with sunlight. The purpose of an ampoule is to temporarily contain something, to keep it in stasis, a state I liken to a latent image, after it has been exposed to light but before it has been rendered visible to the naked eye. State changes can take place too. The rainwater in one tube, for example, can evaporate, condense and precipitate, but can’t escape the tube. It might be easier to say what the images do that the sculptures don’t, which is provide narrative.
The main reason for that visit was to see the environmental chamber they have. It’s typically used by architecture or engineering students, designed to simulate specific environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, light, pressure, and more, to test the effects of these conditions on various materials, products, or biological samples. During that visit I saw the artificial sun, a dome of individually addressable LEDs designed for a similar purpose, simulating sunlight and day cycles. These rooms seemed like interesting parallels to a darkroom or studio, a rigorous and controlled environment programmed for discovery.
Places like this, laboratories, sites of knowledge production, they have always been of interest to me. Bruno Latour has written a book on the subject, offering an ethnographic study of scientific practices within a laboratory. It examines how scientific knowledge is constructed, emphasising that scientific “facts” are the outcome of social processes. I want to examine that; perception and what is implicit, considering the way in which we ‘understand’ our surroundings as constructed in that way, how rigid is that really and how much can it be deformed. I was particularly interested in the facilities at UCL because of their interest in the elasticity of time, specifically the condensing of it. Something that photography is also concerned with, to pause, accelerate or slow it down, as in analogue film. The antithesis of this type of image/place is also important to me, scenes or photographs that could be anywhere, and can be projected onto by anyone, that ambiguity creates a more flexible narrative.
When starting out I often begin with etymology, to help decode or reduce something. For example, the word “camera” derives from the Latin camera, which means “room” or “chamber.” I’m eager to see how certain gestures can be interpreted and applied within an architectural context. I often describe my introduction to photography as a spatial concern, rather than image-focused, and I’d like to explore this facet more thoroughly. The opportunity afforded by the Camden Emerging Artist Prize is the perfect environment to explore this new territory, and will feed most of what I am doing in the studio next year.
