Prints for ‘Process’
Finally got back all of the framed prints I’ll be presenting at my first solo show, called ‘Process’ at the Upstairs Art Gallery in Titirangi. I’ve entered prints in group shows before, but this will be my first time having a space completely to myself, so it’s a very daunting prospect but many thanks to the Upstairs Art Gallery for making it possible. Their mission is to help out emerging artists and I think they do an awesome job at that.
All of the prints I’ll be showing are coffee-toned cyanotypes, exposed using my digital UV-light projector. The LCD screen in the projector has since burnt out, so these prints are (nearly) all effectively edition 1 of 1 now, as I can never make them exactly the same again, or at least not using the same process.
When considering why I made these pieces and what motivates me as an artist, I wrote down the following:
Primarily process driven.
Process is important to me because I feel the need to be physically involved in an act of creation, the act itself is as much the art to me as the final print, and the process followed to create the print leaves an indelible mark. I think that the desire for my work to exist in the physical world and to be experienced in person is a rejection of the trends towards increasingly removing people from the process of photography and art in general. Everything I do is visibly hand-made and unique by virtue of that.
The process used in the creation of these prints lends them an organic feel, low contrast and smooth tones blending from warm in the highlights to cool in the shadows. The lower contrast, lifted blacks and smoothed-out detail tend to give the prints a timeless quality, they remind me of artefacts from a natural history museum. To that end the photos I've chosen to print are artefacts of the world that I've lived in, dispassionate records of things and places. Each print is intended to stand on its own as an artefact and although they don't necessarily tell a story in the conventional sense, the collection still feels cohesive, drawn together through process.
