Wasting Time

Forest Dreams 2025 cyanotype print of multiple exposures on handmade kozo paper

I have a real aversion to ‘wasting time’. When preparing to go to sleep at the end of each day, I check through how I spent my day, starting from getting up to going to bed that night. It’s like an audit of my actions; how I put in the hours and what I achieved.

I don’t remember doing this when I was growing up or even when I was in a ‘proper’ job. I think I was too exhausted for any such self reflection. This ‘inventory of hours’ probably took shape during the pandemic when I was conscious of keeping to a routine which could be productive despite everything around falling apart.

Writing my weekly blog is another inventory of sorts. I look at what I have been creating in the studio. Were there any ‘successes’ or was I wasting my time on experiments? It has felt a bit like that for the past few days.

At the start of the week I set myself a task to find some white paper in my paper drawers as I had run out and didn’t want to buy any. I’m a papermaker for goodness sake! What could I recycle and use that didn’t matter if my experiments were failures?

I found a drawer full of lino-print editions from ten years ago. The images were carefully positioned in the middle of the kozo paper with plenty of border space around them. I cut away the edges of the white paper, soaked them overnight and then made new papers with them.

With nothing to lose, I set about creating more cyanotype prints and experimenting with double exposures, layering of acetate ‘negatives’ and trying out a bit of selective bleaching with washing soda. At the end of Friday’s batch of prints, I seriously questioned if it was all a waste of time.

I had wanted to duplicate the wonderful experiment I made on my last days of the artist residency in Tootgarook. I tried long exposures and free form painting of the cyanotype emulsion on my new handmade papers. Some experiments were better than others.

I used up old cyanotype prints that hadn’t quite worked and put new images over the top. This had some merit but I am yet to be convinced that the experiments are working. It certainly occupied my thoughts all week. I might have to put them aside and continue working on them in another way.

If nothing else, it’s given me a few ideas on how to combine images together from two different projects to create a new story about suburban development vs environmental protection. Perhaps the experiments were not such a waste of time after all.

Work In Progress: cyanotype print from multiple exposures bleached with washing soda