FAÇADE SERIES
Elevations of imagined buildings, 2020
Cyanotype is an early photographic technique (using printed negatives or objects, and prepared paper exposed to sunlight or UV) which includes nature and time in its slow process.
The ‘Façade’ prints originally started as photographs from real war-ruin sites in Shetland that I took in 2015 and never removed from the camera’s memory card. Years later, I found my photographs had become full of glitches and misplaced pixels - they had suffered data decay. It was fascinating that these images of ruination which had inspired thoughts on perspective’s illusionary reality and 20th century ideological ruination had themselves started to degrade. Viewed on our modern screens, images are glowing confirmations of a continuously unfolding present, passing into an everlasting archive as we scroll ever onwards. But even ethereal data is affected by time’s patina.
Rotating and cropping the decayed images, I saw images of modern-looking buildings like architectural elevation drawings emerge. I then introduced aspects of ‘drawing’ (by working on light and dark tones, adding and rubbing out areas), interested in the paradox of making a visual reference to projected futures (cyanotypes or ‘blue-prints’ being synonymous with architect’s plans) for these explorations of ruins. The finished images exist ‘outside of time’, neither photographs of a particular place in time, nor projected images of a blue-print future.
SEEING THROUGH SERIES
Views of Shetland’s war ruins, 2020
As with my war-ruin drawing work, here I explored uncertain architectural spaces. Whilst making these cyanotypes, I became particularly interested in positive/negative relationships - how introducing unexpected inversions can dramatically change how we read space, and so create disorientation. In this way, not only physical decay (in the glimpses of patina and fractured concrete) is suggested, but also the decay of pictorial depth and the stability of the image. We see perspectival images as ‘real’ and the image as a cross-section through the visual pyramid. True to the Dürer’s explanation of perspective (“Perspective is a Latin word which means ‘seeing through’ “[1]), we are meant to believe we’re looking through a window into a space beyond when looking at a perspectival image. In these cyanotypes however, the foreground is undefined and the windows we ‘see through’ are detached, the spaces they suggest forever beyond reach.
PANOFSKY, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. 1937. Translated by C.S.Wood 1991. Zone Books.