As part of the Victorian Giants exhibition at National Portrait Gallery I was invited to take up residence to create unique individual tintype portraits.
Documenting photos and behind the scenes video by Chelin Miller.
I have also been commissioned by Bow Arts to produce a 17 meters wide mural series of tintype portraits as part of the London Festival of Architecture. The commission celebrates the identity of Royal Albert Wharf and its community. This project will act as a precursor to my main residency starting later in the year, forging relationships with the residents, RAW studio artists and RAW Labs visitors.
This month I have been awarded a professional development bursary from a-n. The bursary will support a self-directed research on the chlorophyll printing process. It will enable me to independently learn in my studio an organic photographic method and to make videos to disseminate knowledge of this little-known printing technique. See more info about the grant on this link.
The chlorophyll printing process occurs naturally in plants in the same way we change pigments when we are exposed to different levels of sunlight. Just as our clothes might leave a mark on our skin in the summer, the image above shows an Aloe Vera plant in Tenerife, in which the silhouettes of the outer leaves of the plant are recorded onto the inner leaves.
See more on the chlorophyll printing process on my a-n blog!
I was commissioned by National Portrait Gallery to demonstrate the wet collodion and the albumen printing processes for the Victorian Giants exhibition.
This video is a shorter version from the original one, which is on display at the gallery until the 20th of May 2018. The video was done by Mathew Lew and with the support from Gerlind Lorch, Georgia Atienza, Andrea Easey and Sabina Jaskot-Gill.
©National Portrait Gallery
From Tuesday 23rd of January until the end of March, the Photography Archive and Research Centre of the University of the Arts will be displaying the outcome of the commission they awarded me during April 2017.
The commission consisted in a pop up collodion studio open for four days where over 100 women, men and children were photographed, making a remarkable portrait of the people who passed through this much-loved building, which stands at the centre of change in this iconic London neighbourhood. These portraits are part memorial to, and part celebration of its unique character.
PARC has also published the work on the Field Study journal. Both the exhibition and the publication will be part of the UAL Research Fortnight 2018.