All tagged experimenting
Experimenting can often feel like a waste of time, especially when nothing quite works out like you had hoped. Pushing your materials past their limitations can end up with a total mess. Somewhere in all the chaos there may be a glimpse of a new direction to take. Then you know that all those perceived ‘failures’ were never a waste of time.
Like Alice discovering wonderland, I have dropped down the rabbit hole of research into alternative photographic processes. Shocked at my ignorance relating to silver extraction for the photographic industry, I am discovering ‘kitchen compounds’ and botanical processes that promise to be an alternative method of image production.
Have you ever felt your ideas have sprung from ‘out of the blue’? Yet the colours, processes and themes which have caught your interest along the way have all pointed you in your current direction. That is what I have discovered about my abiding love for the colour blue and the joy of cyanotype printmaking.
There are so many things you could make, it can be hard to know where to start. I’ve been making blank notebooks using up old prints that I folded to become the little book covers. Creating these notebooks has put me back into ‘maker mode’. What will go inside them? The possibilities are endless.
I have always been drawn to travellers’ tales, both adventure travel tales as well as stories of the Roma people and travellers who were once a common sight camped in the English countryside. Thinking about travelling and finding shelter these past two weeks has led me to experiment with cyanotype prints out in the field with what materials I had to hand.
I have always thought of site specific art as part of an external landscape, something ‘outside’. This changed when I started making art on flattened out cardboard boxes from things I had eaten, drunk or ingested. Adding actual coffee and wine to the mix has yielded surprising results.
Thinking with your materials means you allow the unique quality of that material to lead you into experimentation. “What if” becomes the starting point for my experiments with abstract painting using bright coloured paper pulp.
