PENCILLED IN NATURE
2015. Tintype plates, unique editions. Media: Wet plate collodion.
Pencilled in Nature alludes to photographs in Henry Fox Talbot’s opus The Pencil of Nature (1844). The plates incorporate imagery printed onto polyester fabric using an industrial flat bed printer and realised with original 19th Century wet plate chemistry, camera and lens, in a gentle critique of Talbot’s belief that the medium was itself ‘impressed by Nature’s hand’.
Produced in Australia and upstate New York each tintype was later framed behind fluorescent pink acrylic, negating the currently fashionable, fetishised wet plate aesthetic, invoking what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as, “…strange new becomings, new polyvocalities’’.
Everything old is co-present again.
2015. Unique plates. Media: Tintypes in original 19th Century chemistry, Potassium Cyanide fixative, 25 x 20cm.
Pencilled in Nature I (noon and shade) (2015). Tintype photograph, 20 x 25cm, fluorescent acrylic mask.
Pencilled in Nature II (the door ajar) (2015). Tintype photograph, 20 x 25cm, fluorescent acrylic mask.