Shadowlands
Mark Walter Explores an Alternative Photography Process
Shadowlands was a collaboration between six artists and is part of the Photo Hastings festival that has run since 2010. This year the festival decided to have three weeks at Electro studios, a project space in West St Leonards, showcasing different artists from Photo Hastings. I caught up with the exhibition in the third week at the well-attended and entertaining private view in which there were multiple performances by Caroline Gregory, Jude Montague and Louise Whitham on related themes to Shadowlands. The show’s title responds to this darkening time of year in which shadows lengthen and the ancestors and spirits are said to converse with the living in many cultures, including Celtic and Baltic mythology. Montague’s candlelit shadow performance summoned up the time of Velu Laiks, the Latvian ‘time of spirits’ when people remember their ancestors and reflect on the mystery of life and death in different ways.
The artists were asked to work in alternative processes by Louise Whitham and Jude Montague, two local photographers and artists who work in multiple disciplines. Whitham runs Titanic Arts Club providing tutoring and original art education, and Montague is part of the printmaker workshop Montague and Armstrong on Kings Road, St Leonards. Each artist responded in different ways.
Man with a Hand
Alison Bettles’ practice captures the beauty of the natural world. For this exhibition Alison created a personal series of pinhole images created in black and white using direct positive paper. Following a long-standing interest in intimate personal environments, she took pictures of flowers and plants in a domestic setting over this hot summer. She photographed several inherited vases with flowers from her garden and took dark garden shots from inside the borders, some of which looked surprisingly space-age.
Ian Land, photographer and editor and publisher with Silverhill Press, revisited some older work, made in 2009, six long exposure pinhole photographs, shot on colour slide film were taken on the beach. The long exposures, shot on expired film, acquired a sentimental and extraordinary depth of colour and a misty nature. His subject could be interpreted as the sea, the light, and the passing of time. Rachel Williams is a printmaking artist whose studio is at Electro Studios. She expanded her practice for this show to create a short series of doctored polaroids, in which the polaroid is interfered with during development. Breaking with her usual printmaker’s practice of insisting on having her hand in the creating process, on this occasion she worked with Solaris studio to produce a short series of digital prints, because the original polaroids may degenerate over time.
Estelle Vincent has a long-standing practice in experimental photography. The only artist in the show not to reside near or in Hastings, but in London. She created an intriguing series of chromatograms in which the soil from the Great North Wood was dissolved in a fluid and then carried through the paper, mapping the constituents of the material. Louise Whitham, curator and artist attracted much interest through her innovative contact photography. Part of her practice is chlorophyll printing where photographic images are developed on natural leaves through the action of photosynthesis. This organic technique does not use chemicals and Louise’s artist talk built on her environmental activism, asking visitors to consider contributing a pledge to ‘Culture Declares Emergency’. Lousie’s practices involved cyanotype on different surfaces including recycling old pizza boxes.
Jude Montague created a series of cyanotype portraits which only use the sun as a developer. Displayed architecturally in a towering cake, the larger-than-life faces were named Saule’s Spirits after the Latvian goddess of the sun. Developed in sunlight, Jude was also responding to early photography’s attempt to capture the spiritual as well as the material world. During exposure, the acetates had been held down by circles of glass and debris which emphasized the intervention of chance light.
• For more information on Photo Hastings, view their website: www.photohastings.org
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