Since 2017, I have been working on a project on my relationship with education and creation. As I have not taught for a few years, I have not touched this material for a while. In the past year, I have reinvigorated my efforts in this direction and have started to work on rehearsal strips of my former students.
As by-products of enlargement, the test strips have become images in their own right. On the one hand, they embody the work of my former students and the experience and process of knowledge transfer, and on the other hand, they are for me a symbol of chemical photography. I am primarily captured by their loss of function as they become independent of the final, laboratory images.
In this exhibition I am juxtaposing this series with two of my earlier works that also started from this question. One is a group of works inspired by Alison Rossiter, which was made by developing my former students’ mismanaged, accidentally exposed, discarded photographic papers.
Also included are petri dishes containing silver that leached out of the students’ chemicals when the photos were labaged: these reveal the essence of photography, silver that provides light sensitivity. At the same time, its form, the “container”, is also revealing, as it refers to chemistry and experimentation.
The photograms of these glass objects rhyme with other, simple, laboratory-made images, while reducing the glass substrates to planes. They also reflect on the reproductive nature of photography and the negative-positive play inherent in it.