Figureheads, 1976 - 2005
One of the starting points for this project were a set of landscape photographs, made when I was a student of photography, I had been exploring the 5” x 4” format, using a ‘field camera’. At the time I felt that these photographs weren’t going anywhere, maybe because of using such heavy and cumbersome equipment they lacked spontaneity. Reflecting on my experience in the late 1970s, I was influenced by the early American landscape photographers (I wrote my thesis on Timothy O’Sullivan), contemporary American photographers, those of the ‘new topographics’ and by my tutors; Raymond Moore, Paul Hill, John Blakemore and Thomas Joshua Cooper. There were few published examples of women photographing in the landscape.
This series came together in the darkroom, a place of experiment. I cannot remember why I returned to the box of old landscape negatives or why I began the process of combining two discrete photographs taken at different locations, inside and outside. Figureheads from maritime museums with landscapes that bring together different moments in time spanning a period of nearly 30 years.
The series were made in the darkroom using two enlargers; one negative was exposed onto the photographic paper, and then moved to the other enlarger and exposed to the second negative. Using this method of layering the contrast, scale and juxtaposition can be manipulated, the two images become one. With these large scale prints (40” x 40”), the floor became the masking frame, the element of chance is introduced by the alignment of the paper, thus no two images are the same.
Once the paper has been exposed, it was moved to a large sink, where the developer was applied with a sponge. As the developer flows over the surface, the latent image gradually appears. Initially there is a streaked effect as the developer isn’t applied evenly, as the processing continues these marks tends to sink into the surface of the fibre based paper, leaving gestural watery traces, contributing to the uniqueness of each print.
The series were originally developed for ‘Swinging the Lead’ a group exhibition that was part of the ‘Festival of the Sea’ Bristol, 1996. Later for ‘Sea Change’ Spacex Gallery Exeter, 2001, and they formed a major component of a solo exhibition ‘Viewing Distance, a retrospective’ Bergen, Norway, 2001.
