While I love using a lens to capture light I am recently enjoying more of the iterative, step-by-step process of making. I am discovering how building towards something that isn’t preconceived can welcome experimentation and adventure - how the process becomes an integration of each texture, color, pattern - like fabric. Something cumulative out of small parts, not always greater than, but a cooperative effort that creates a subtle hand-loomed effect. Nowhere have I been better able to explore this approach to my art than with the Cyanotype photographic process.
The Cyanotype is a process that came to mind when I was traveling abroad with students this Summer as a way to connect them to the land and cement their understanding of exposure, history and process through experience. We made blue impressions of coneflower, sage, clover and blackberry in the sun in the Czech Republic and later, I spent time, alone, on the far West coast of Ireland, and made my own impressions in blue.
I thought of Anna Atkins and her work combining science and nature in Photographs of British Algae 1843-53, and took the time to walk the shores on the Dingle Peninsula gathering from the edge of the waves and making camera-less images using everything from seaweed to jellyfish as the mist inevitably contributed a temporal ‘print’ to the very site-specific works before I ‘developed’ them in the waters of the Atlantic.
Once home, I returned again and again to the images I had gathered of lace curtains in cottage windows and thought of Julia Herschel’s book - also made using the Cyanotype Process - A Handbook for Greek and Roman Lace Making, 1869. It has not been uncommon to see doilies, lace and other garments or items of tremendous skill and fragile pattern archived through the cyanotype process. Like the delicate edges and branches of seaweed and transparent agae, these textile pieces are also items whose images are most faithfully translated when they do that job themselves. The connection between the threads of lace, skeins of yarn and tendrils of the seaweed wove themselves naturally into something that I am only now just beginning to see the pattern and want to keep playing at the threads - pulling and tucking into something that is more personal and loomed from a rich variety of parts.