Reconfigured/Rediscovered - Described exhibition Tour Transcript
Will McRostie:
We'll wrangle with this for a little while and then we'll start introductions properly
Hello is there someone on the call now named Mao or Mo?
Hello how are you?
Mao:
Hi this is Mao
Will McRostie:
Nice to meet you Mao, I’m Will from Description Victoria and we are just getting set up with letting everybody in.
Pete Sumner:
How many all together are in on the call?
Will McRostie:
Um at the moment there's myself uh Rachel and Elle uh from Town Hall Gallery, there's Danica who's one of the artists joining us um there is yourself there is Mao and there's now a person whose video has just come on before us hello you just gave us a wave who are you?
Ramona:
Ramona, from Melbourne.
Will McRostie:
Hey Ramona how are you?
Ramona:
Hi Will, good to talk to you.
Will McRostie:
Yeah, you too it's been a really long time
Ramona: I just had um I was on I’ve been on since the beginning but um my antivirus came up and didn't like Zoom so I had to convince it it was okay.
Will McRostie:
Sure Ramona your name's coming up as Rachel who's one of our hosts for some reason so I’m just going to change that in Zoom so that we can keep track of who's the real Rachel and who's the Ramona yeah I don't know.
Pete Sumner:
Hi Ramona it's Pete here Pete Sumner. How are you?
Ramona:
Hi Pete, I didn’t hear you at first, Will, I don't know why that would happen because I thought I was logged into my own basic account.
Will McRostie:
The Zoom the Zoom bugs are a foot I have no idea as well.
Ramona:
So this is obviously a Zoom meeting not a webinar is that right?
Will McRostie:
That's correct yeah cool. Okay and we haven't said hello to Michelle yet hi Michelle are you there?
Ramona:
Would you like us to be on mute?
Will McRostie:
Uh yeah I think that would be uh unless you're uh chiming in. We'll go over some ground rules in a second during our intro but um yeah in general it's probably best unless you want to contribute to keep yourself on mute - thanks.
Nothing from Michelle. That's fine well Elle should we introductions and if anyone else comes we can uh let them in and take it from there
Elle Hale:
Yeah absolutely. All right um so uh welcome everyone who's joining us uh for this meeting or dialling in. This is a described exhibition tour for the Town Hall Gallery exhibition Reconfigured/ Rediscovered. My name's Elle Hale I’m one of the curators working at the City of Boroondara responsible for curating exhibitions at the Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn and also looking after the Town Hall Gallery collection. I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners as the original custodians of this land including the Wurundjeri people in the northern part of our city and pay my respects to their Elders past and present and the Elders from other communities who may be present here today. I’d like to introduce Rachel Keir-Smith fellow curator at the Town Hall Gallery thanks Rachel for joining us and helping uh organise and deliver this event.
Rachel Keir-Smith:
My pleasure.
Elle Hale:
Thank you and I’d also like to introduce Will McRostie service coordinator and lead describer from Description Victoria thank you Will.
Will McRostie:
Hello.
Elle Hale:
During the next hour and a half Will's going to be leading us on a described tour of the exhibition focusing on work by three artists: Robyn Stacey, Izabela Pluta and Danica Chappell and really thrilled to also be joined today by the artist Danica Chappell thanks Danica.
Danica Chappell:
Thank you, it's great to be here.
Elle Hale:
So as I mentioned, Will’s going to be describing the exhibition and he'll be posing questions to myself um and to Danica and facilitating a broader discussion as well. We very much welcome questions from you throughout the discussion, but I do think it's probably a good idea to keep yourselves on mute until you do want to reach out with a question and you're also welcome to use the chat function at the bottom of the screen please keep in mind that we are recording this session uh to give a brief introduction to the exhibition that we're discussing today it's called Reconfigured/Rediscovered it's a group exhibition installed um right now at the Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn which is in the Hawthorn Arts Centre and it features seven artists who all uh extend our understanding and perceptions of photography and image making into new realms so the artists highlight the permeability of photography, question the relationship between image and reality asking how images operate how they can be created without a camera and we're looking at forms of photography that have been liberated from a traditional relationship between taking a photo and then printing a photo and the artist experiment with early photographic techniques and treating photography not just as a 2D artwork, but also as an object, or as an installation. The exhibition is an official exhibition of the PHOTO 2021 international festival of photography and uh we're really thrilled to be part of that festival. So now I’d like to hand over to Will - thanks so much Will, we're really thrilled to have you um helping us to deliver this kind of event.
Will McRostie:
No worries, it is wonderful to be here and thank you for having us. So we're going to be talking about work by three different artists today who work with photography in all manner of ways and all manner of techniques in photography. I was wondering before we kind of get stuck in, if any of of our attendees, if anyone's had any experience with photography as a photographer um or a subject of photography in the past um that they might be bringing to the tour today that they would want to share?
- no response -
I’ll take that as a resounding “no”. Cool, that is totally fine um so we're gonna be talking and it might get a little technical and there are some really interesting technical terms that come up um in the discussion of photography, but I would more than welcome anyone in the group to please interrupt if we are using any jargon or if there are any words that um you don't know and we can uh pause and explain. Danica and Elle and I had a wonderful conversation the other day and uh Danica is a real expert in art of photography which is wonderful to have present with us um and so we have a lot of expertise available in this space what is that loud noise that's happening outside my house? Who knows! Great, let's plough on so uh the three artists that we're going to be talking about today are Robyn Stacey, Izabela Pluta and Danica Chappell and between those three artists we have three uh really interesting and really different styles of photography that are going to kind of lead us through um what photography was and the kind of earliest origins of the idea of photography um right through kind of how to create with um monochrome and in in just black and white and grey shades and right through to the use of colour which is in Danica's work kind of explosions of colour um within uh analogue photography processes. I am going to screen share the imagery of the work if that's of use for anyone, but rest assured the only things that are appearing in that screen share are just the images themselves there's no um additional presentation or information that will come through with them. So I’m just going to start that now has that come up can someone give me a yes?
Fabulous, so starting with Robyn Stacey's work Lighthouse Wharf Hotel Port Adelaide this large photographic print measuring 160cm wide and 110cm high presents two images that have been melded into one a bright outdoor scene, immediately leaps from the print though turned upside down. A bright blue sky frosted with fluffy clouds hovers underneath a red and white lighthouse with its base at the top of the image and the light closer to the bottom. Upon closer inspection it's evident that this inverted scene is being projected into the corner of a slightly dingy room, where cracked white walls and the ceiling act as a projection screen for the outdoor scene. Various objects litter the room including a long painting of a steamship leaning against the left-hand wall, and a wooden ship's wheel leaning against the right-hand wall. A chipped white door seals out the light from outside in the corner of the room, a small window at the top of the door covered by a blind and warm light spills in around the curtain and through the crack between the door and the floor. This effect of bringing the outside in is achieved using one of the oldest techniques for manipulating light called “camera obscura”. It's a technique that has its roots in the 16th century when it was discovered that creating a small hole in the wall of a darkened room would cause the light from outside to be projected onto the opposite wall of the space as an inverted image of the outside world. I’m going to pause there and just check does that kind of make sense to everyone or do we need to have a little bit more of a discussion about exactly how that works?
Ramona:
Uh, it's Ramona speaking. I think it makes sense, but I think your description I think you're saying that there's a painting of the lighthouse that's inverted but then when you look further back there's the rest of the picture shows that room that the painting is being projected upon and those light effects are within that room.
Will McRostie:
Yeah, it's not even that there's a painting of the lighthouse, so yeah the view that's being projected onto the wall is the view from the outside of the room so behind the perspective of the photographer um there would be say, a window that the artist has covered up with material to block the light down to a very very small hole and so what's happening is that the image that's being projected onto the room that we're seeing is an image of what is actually outside the room at that time but just turned upside down.
Ramona:
Got it, yeah, thank you.
Will McRostie:
No worries. So Stacey has used the same effect here creating a lens in the window of a pub to create a projection inside a disused storeroom and it's a pub in Port Adelaide, my hometown thank you very much! Elle, I was wondering about what you were telling me about Robyn how she chooses the spaces for these works and what kinds of spacious she's looking to um utilize in making these kinds of things, so what kinds of spaces is she interested in exploring?
Elle Hale:
Um good, that's a really good question. I I’d say it's quite a broad range really um but the works that we selected um for the exhibition are from a series called Dark Wonder where Robyn Stacey focused on the creative spaces of artists or interesting um sort of public spaces and that sort of thing um and actually they're not just from Adelaide but all across Australia really. There's another work that's in Sydney um or a couple actually so she's sort of focusing on yeah a lot of different spaces um and she actually …
Will McRostie:
Oh we've just lost you your sound Elle.
Elle Hale:
Can you hear me?
Will McRostie:
Yes you're back.
Elle Hale:
Oh good sorry, um so uh Robyn was saying that when she selects rooms um they're very dependent on the position of the sun in the sky so this camera obscura effect that you've described creates this crazy mashup of the images that's a room, that you're looking at a room but it also has the view outside the window reflected upside down in the room and um you have to have very specific lighting conditions to make it work so um Robyn described there being sort of rooms that work better in the morning or rooms that work better in the afternoon um and also she said um mention that there's even a room that was only really just had the right conditions for 20 minutes a day. So um when she documents the experience of this camera obscura she um she always make sure that any tests are actually um could be a sort of finished result as well because she doesn't know uh when she goes back if she's going to be able to achieve the same results and she also clarified with me recently, I’m sort of um I guess sharing some insights that Robyn shared with us uh through an online panel discussion we had last weekend and I learned a lot more about this camera obscura process which apparently even goes back as far as 5th Century BC um camera meaning Latin for room and of your remaining dark so it's literally a dark room um it gets totally blacked out with that small opening in the window to the outside world and that window that opening becomes a lens um and because light travels in a straight line everything appears upside down which is of course how images are formed in the retina of the eye but our brain writes them back the right way up for us. So it's a very um, it creates a very magical experience I think and Robyn was describing um people seeing these images and not believing um that they were real and that they must have been photoshopped so she started to create a physical walking camera obscura that people could experience at say art fairs or festivals and that sort of thing and often there'd be a bit of a queue and people wouldn't want to wouldn't want to leave.
Will McRostie:
Yeah for me the precision and the clarity of the projection is really really remarkable, so in the upside down image she's managed to match the kind of line and plane of the ground outside really exactly with the line and plane of the ceiling um so it looks it kind of expands the dimensions of the room and it looks like the this this kind of dingy storeroom at the pub um is no longer this kind of small cramped space, but instead this expansive kind of imagined um alternate reality where everything is upside down it's very airy and light.
Danica we were kind of talking the other day about um about camera obscura and its history and the way that …
Danica Chappell:
Oh I’ve just lost I’ve just lost you there oh um …
Will McRostie:
Create really really … you are we back? Uh can you hear me Danica?
Danica Chappell:
Yes I can hear you now.
Will McRostie:
I think I’m back yep okay good I had a little “your internet connection is unstable moment” which always happens when you're hosting a tour.
Yes I’ll say what I was saying again, the first kind of use of this uh or one of the first uses of this was to try and like capture reality and to try and create illustrations of um the outside and of landscapes that had not yet been able to be rendered in such specific detail.
Danica Chappell:
Yes so your um Dutch Renaissance painters you know use the camera obscura uh veneer um to to be able to um see the light and record this hyper realistic uh depths of of perception um so they would often build these camera obscuras and they were used to be on tracks that they could then track through a space because the interesting thing with the camera obscura is um and Robyn has it has the lens, which is the opening to the outside that brings the light in to the inside, uh she has the lens calculated to get an infinite depth of field so that it's sharp the image that's projected is sharp from the front right through to the back um, but you can often trace where early, early painters didn't have that knowledge and they would then track their camera obscura on rails so that they could get the sharpness through the image that they were painting.
Will McRostie:
Yeah because before that it was just the artist's eye people's eye to be able to render things you didn't have the ability to kind of capture light and um you like kind of manipulate it in a way to render these scenes accurately.
Danica Chappell:
Yes, as the eye sees it was down to the skill of the painter it's still down to the skill of the painter full rendering light and translucency of course um but um you know the camera obscura really helped and David Hockney is uh an artist that did a huge amount of investigation on renaissance painters and the introduction of the lens to painting which precedes the photography or the photograph.
Will McRostie:
Yeah cool does anyone from the group have any questions or comments or anything they'd like clarified from the discussion or about camera obscure or this work?
Pete Sumner:
I’d like to ask um you've explained the technical details very well and I have a clear picture of that in my mind, but I’d be interested to know your uh opinion or view of what the what impression the artist was trying to create what feeling do you think that artist was trying to convey?
Group:
That's a great that's a great question actually
Danica Chappell:
And I guess that's open to interpretation for who um is reading the image I guess. Peter I’ve been in one of Robyn Stacey's camera obscuras um when she set one up in Melbourne um as well as standing in front of uh an image like um what we what we see in the exhibition and there's definitely um a feeling for me when I’m inside the camera obscura that I’m getting this beautiful saturation of colour that is almost hyper real because you enter into a dark space but then you get, particularly here in Australia with the bright sun that we have, um and you get this hyper-concentrated type of contrast-y saturation and this is what we have on the screen at the moment is this beautiful rendering of blues and reds and whites from the clouds, coming into this sort of nautical interior and um that's kind of in disarray and uh derelict you know. I think maybe Robyn has taken things off the wall to clear the wall for the projection but they leave a trace of this connection of what the interior might be to what the exterior is.
Elle Hale:
Robyn's also described the experience of being in one of these rooms um like being in your own private movie and the photographs that document the rooms um don't always convey the whole story in a way, because um she mentioned when you're in one of these rooms you can see people walking um walking across, or a plane flying in the sky, or a ship sailing across the water and um because she has to capture them with a long exposure, you don't see that sort of movement um that you would experience when you're in it. I get the impression that it would be pretty um a pretty magical experience.
Rachel Keir-Smith:
Peter it's Rachel, when I look at it I feel like it's very dreamlike like there are objects floating through a space that are kind of disorientating, they're at different angles to what you would expect um and because there's a sky and it has this kind of vastness um yeah these objects floating within the skyscape feel yeah kind of surreal, or absurd, or strange, but yeah very kind of atmospheric and dreamlike.
Pete Sumner:
Okay, mm hmm. Is there a suggestion of say, weightlessness? I take it I got the impression that some of the images were suspended as it were from the ceiling is that correct or have I misunderstood?
Will McRostie:
So the image is being projected um onto the wall and it thus uh the effect is that it does look like the inverted lighthouse is hanging down.
Pete Sumner:
Mm hmm, okay.
Will McRostie:
I mean it’s a fair case that nothing in the room, none of the physical kind of structures that are inside this room have been uh altered, painted, um sculpted, had anything applied to them any kind of pigment or anything, it's just the way that the light is projected into the room.
Pete Sumner:
Okay, so it's not like Surrealism where some of the images are just deliberately distorted, or augmented, or something like that?
Will McRostie:
No, yeah, it's a very real scene, it just it is 100 per cent completely upside down and that's what gives it this kind of dreamlike quality um because it just is.
Pete Sumner:
Is there any suggestion of opposite movement in the image?
Will McRostie:
Uh I would say not particularly so, as Elle said when the photograph is taken that documents the room and the projection in the room the artist has to use a camera with a very, very long exposure which means that they keep the lens of the camera open for a very long time and anything that moves while that lens is open is going to appear as a blur in the image so I think very intentionally she's trying to capture very static scenes for the photographs but um as Rachel described when you're in it in real life you can watch people in the upside-down projection walking around outside and watch the clouds moving across the sky so this is a very frozen snapshot moment from what is …
Pete Sumner:
Like you're holding your breath, so to speak?
Ramona:
It's Ramona speaking, it also seems to me that there is a number of contrasts all around a maritime theme, so the room itself has maritime objects but the image is of a lighthouse being projected so there's that maritime, but there's the contrasts of inside upright and outside being projected inside upside down. There's the red versus the blue um it's the light versus dark so it seems to be a lot of contrasting things and I’m wondering if um the contrasts of the red versus blue or the light versus dark or the upside down versus inside upright, has a disorienting effect for the viewer at all?
Will McRostie:
Uh yeah I would certainly agree with that fact and it's difficult for your eye to pass a typical, from my eye I should say, to pass and figure out which reality is I’m looking at like it's it's trying to comprehend two contradictory things at the same time. So yes disorienting is an excellent word.
We might um move on to our next artist um if that's okay um we're gonna talk about uh artist Izabela Pluta who is I have not asked this Elle, is an Australian artist?
Elle Hale:
Yes she is, yes she migrated to Australia back in the um late 80s from Poland, but I do believe she considers herself to be an Australian artist.
Will McRostie:
Cool, I’m just going to advance the imagery. So Izabela has, we're going to talk about three works uh the first is called ‘Iterative Composition 1979 pages 17 to 18 Australia’. There are a lot of very funky titles in this exhibition.
Izabela has created a wide borderless print that dominates one wall of the gallery measuring 124cm high and 2m wide the print shows ghostly grey and white forms on a dark background. Viewed from afar, the work has the quality of an x-ray image showing a roughly symmetrical butterfly form that resembles the skeletal shape of the hips and pelvis, so two splayed lobes connected at a narrow centre. When viewed up close, details emerge in the right lobe writing in a collection of formal looking fonts denote place names, but written in reverse. The centre of that lobe is labelled Western Australia and is surrounded by thin sneaking white lines that show waterways highways lakes and points of interest in a disorienting mishmash of maps and places, so all sorts of different maps have been overlaid over the top of each other on this in this form. The left lobe is less clearly marked with text, though faint ghostly letters do still appear. This lobe has regions filled in with interlocking splotches of grey that have been numbered the bottom left and right hand corners of the image feature faint uh text of a map legend indicating various eras in geological history and the top left and right hand corners there are label reading Australia geology and a page number that reads 18.
Was that a question Peter or just uh uh-hum? (reacting to sound)
We're all good. Okay um so I wanted to pause here quickly and um Danica if you would just be able to talk about this idea of a photogram and what a photogram, this is a photogram, correct?
Danica Chappell:
Yes, this is a photogram and um it's term was coined I guess uh in um about well around the 1920s by an artist called László Moholy-Nagy although many artists were operating with this process of making a x-ray type image of something onto photographic paper and basically it's a shadow of an object that is uh has light projected through it on top of a light sensitive substrate, that then renders things as a negative of the positive so the object that is on top of the surface leaves a shadowy trace in particularly on black and white paper in tones of greys and from blacks and then through to whites. Where there is a white mark, uh usually means that its light has not penetrated and where there is a dark mark, light has penetrated and activated the silver in the light sensitive substrate of the paper. Is that OK?
Will McRostie:
… yes I’m uh having a little bit of trouble with my uh connection so I’m gonna stop my video and just see if that helps okay um but you'll still be able to hear me, hello?
So I’m going to repeat that back to you because I’m still building my understanding of how they work. So we've got a light sensitive material um in this case with it's a paper that has a substance on it which is a kind of like a silver based chemical?
Danica Chappell:
It's a silver-based um well silver-based application that has been treated and sensitised to light. That remains, you know away from any light and then when it interacts with light it's uh the silver particles become charged and they turn dark or black depending on the amount of light that has reached it.
Will McRostie:
Yeah and so then you're working in a dark space your lag in a photogram you're going to be layering images uh objects anything that you want to try and create an image with on top of that paper and then exposing it to light and the paper will react depending on how much light is able to reach it through the things that you've arranged on the top?
Danica Chappell:
That's correct yes and so where there is a lighter whiter mark usually means that no light has penetrated through to um the paper below the object.
Will McRostie:
Yeah, cool and so we're dealing with geographies we're dealing with maps and atlases Elle I know you've had the privilege of talking to Izabela about this work and some of the conceptual kind of ideas she's trying to bring to it, so I was just wondering if you could fill us in on the maps and where they were found and what um what Izabela is trying to kind of say with this work?
Elle Hale:
Absolutely. So yeah, so she created this photogram using an out of date atlas um three different versions she actually um said that she then placed she called the atlas apart and she placed the sheets of paper from the atlas on top of that photographic paper and shined a light through it to get this effect.
I feel like there's a lot of different layers to Izabela's work to try and understand it in a way. Particularly the way that she's creating this blurred map and just disrupting the geography, I think goes back to her experience as being a migrant from Poland um coming out to Australia in the late 80s and it's sort of like a critique on um globalisation and procedures of colonialism, but on top of that um Izabela also I read in a recent interview in a magazine called Artist Profile she described herself as having a very precarious relationship with the medium of photography and that she often um tries to resist its language um and she makes us stop and consider what it is that we're actually looking at um and she really dislocates her image, um the image that we've got is really dislocated from the original source, so it probably looks nothing like the maps um that you pulled from the atlas and used for the photogram. What we get is this very disorienting kind of slightly suggestion of land masses that are difficult to kind of place and recognise. So um does that sort of start to start to answer your questions?
Will McRostie:
Yeah, no absolutely and then I think it's also interesting that I think it's a pretty common perception that you see with the kind of because the hues are very similar to an x-ray um of a body so you then kind of start seeing these as uh anatomy or parts of bodies, as well as being depictions of landscapes, as well so you then kind of layer an individual on top of the landscape.
Elle Hale:
That's right and she's yeah and she's very much um sort of disrupting what the function of an atlas as well too, like in terms of giving you information and a very clear geography it's very disruptive and hard and imprecise as well.
Will McRostie:
Excellent, uh any questions from the floor?
Ramona:
It's Ramona, um I had a couple of comments and questions please. First of all Will you're doing an excellent job as usual of describing and you've got such a nice voice to listen to, but your descriptions are great as well so.
Will McRostie:
Thank you.
Ramona:
And your mike's very good as he's done
Will McRostie:
I’ve got to go into a pandemic with a voice-over mike!
Ramona:
Absolutely, um I just a couple of questions um when you refer to the silver I presume that's not just referring to a silver coloured content but it's actually silver as in the metal?
Danica Chappell:
Yes um maybe I can help here. So Ramona there's a thing that um happened at the start of photography uh back in the 1800s really I guess, um heaps of scientists sort of predicted this, that the chemical reaction uh could take place that things could interact with light while they were studying things like radiation um and so you know independently, a group of scientists sort of went into these labs to sort of um explore that reaction, which eventually got us to photography. So although it's a silver particle and so the first the very first um uh I guess uh achievable photographic process was the daguerreotype um that is actually made on a pure silver plate um or a coated plate with silver, so that's actually a chemical reaction with big particles of silver. As time and photography progressed, it was refined and refined and refined and also with silver shortages they were able to coat papers with tiny particles of silver mixed um in the thing called an emulsion on top of a um a piece of paper, um which doesn't appear as a silver sheet but it's embedded in this kind of emulsion and it doesn't take too many of these silver particles to be able to react with light to give an image.
Ramona:
Okay great oh thank you that's good. Now Will, you describe the text as being in reverse and at first, I was wondering does that mean the letters are reversed as well as the order or was it just the order so you'd have the letters the correct orientation but in the reverse order going from left to right? But based on what Rachel was saying about the technique I think where you may be laying pages down then the whole thing would be reversed and much like I guess a mirror image um that's how I’m assuming it and um Rachel I think it was you that was saying that um it indicates I guess there's a depiction of a critique of globalisation or colonialism and I was wondering what are the aspects that make you say that?
Elle Hale:
I suppose, I’m sorry that this is Elle um I I’m guessing that this is um just one way that the artist is uh exploring her experience um being a being a migrant um and I guess it's I describe it as having disrupted the geography um and she's basically um perhaps not always um visible in this example but there's another work we'll be looking at um as well uh a different a different similar looking sort of style um where Izabela's made it very hard for you to work out, for example, what country it is that you're looking at, or um or make out the cities, or where one country ends and another one starts, um it's all become blurred and kind of combined into one big blob in a way so just taking down those orders.
Ramona:
Sorry, okay so could that be for example I think from what I recall from the description the Western the reference to Western Australia in it's like vaguely that hip shape or that butterfly shape is roughly an Australian shape but the indication of Western is right in the middle, not on the west where we'd expect it. Would that be an example of what you're saying there?
Elle Hale:
I guess it well it does appear on the um on the right hand side of the image, so I suppose it has been swapped over and no longer on the western side so I think that's a good way to describe it.
Will McRostie:
Yeah I think it's also the case that you, for me looking at it, I do not recognise this place as being a place until I get closer and read the text it says Western Australia. I see that it's backwards and then I kind of go, “ah yeah, okay that does look like the the shape that I recognise um as the edge of Western Australia”.
Ramona:
Yes okay.
Will McRostie:
But you don't have that uh instantaneous context that you would normally have looking at the shapes of countries and the borders you have to reorient yourself within the image so that you're having to do work that you're not used to having to do when looking at atlases and maps.
Ramona:
Okay thank you.
Will McRostie:
Any other questions?
Izabela has also has made a bunch of different works uh in this same style as Elle referred to um which she calls spatial misalignments which I think is a wonderful uh way to give a sense of the tone of the work um, so these occupy the a long wall in the gallery and there are 60 silver gelatin prints but they've been printed on sheets of glass and they're resting on shelves in two long rows on the wall of the gallery that stretched to about 11 metres wide and each shows in the similar style as the larger image a pair of images overlaying maps and atlases to create these ghostly new geographies of different places in the world and you have that same experience of looking at it I first always see you know an x-ray, I see a body part, I see a cross-section of something from an MRI and then on closer inspection you can find the words in reverse or correctly forwards that kind of tell you what this place is supposed to be or the source material and then you have to start sorting out whether you can actually recognize the country depicted or the place depicted in the map itself.
Is there any other, was there anything about we talked a little bit about the difference between the big print on the wall and printing on glass? That's the more kind of old-school traditional form of this kind of work is that right Danica, would be printing on glass?
Danica Chappell:
Yes, so um there is a process called wet plate which was devised around 1850s or so which sort of was a faster process of a quicker exposure time than the daguerreotype process so the exposure time was quite slow for a daguerreotype which is this first process. It also um is a um it needs to be fully exposed and maintained, its exposure through the stages of it being wet once the chemical compounds are dried the plate is uh known as a dead plate so the um the artist or the photographer has to work quite quickly to coat the plate sensitise the plate and expose onto the plate and process and depending on I guess humidity uh temperature outside things like that can all extend or shorten that um making time.
Will McRostie:
And Elle did you have something you want to jump in with because your mic’s on, or no?
Elle Hale:
Sorry say that again?
Will McRostie:
Oh you can jump in with something because your mic is on, or were you just having a mic on?
Elle Hale:
Sorry, I should have muted myself.
Will McRostie:
It's okay I’m gonna dob you in if I see your mic on!
So there's one more work of Izabela's that we're going to address uh before we move on to Danica's work. This work is called blue spectrum and it's a process known as a cyanotype which is another analogue process of image making and it's in a similar vein to using the silver chemicals this work measures 52cm high by 42cm wide and depicts a ghostly arrangement of blue shadows more sparse than Pluta's other works blue spectrum shows a field of deep blue in two main tones the top two thirds of the image is a lighter mottled blue and the lower third has a darker hue with two undulations like creases in fabric stretching across its height the border between the two coloured regions is a sharp uneven line that starts at about half the image height at left then drops steeply through a curve and ends at about a third of the image height at right and I think Elle and Danica wanted me to include this one, because it's one of those ones where it's very sparse and seems very simple to look at, but it's actually quite a complex process that Izabela undertook during lockdown to create this image.
Elle Hale:
Will, do you think you might be able to scroll through a couple of images? We've got a request to um to see the image up on the screen.
Will McRostie:
Yes absolutely, my apologies for forgetting that. For those who are looking, this is the Spatial misalignments that work on shelves on a gallery wall and now I’m going to flick to Blue spectrum.
Elle Hale:
I might um jump in and just talk a little bit more about the subject matter and then I might um draw on your expertise Danica around explaining the cyanotype.
Danica Chappell:
Sure.
Elle Hale:
So just to start um this work um is a cyanotype, which we'll go into in just a moment, um but it's from a series of 26 cyanotypes and the series is called Measures of refraction and it's a little different to the two works or the two series that we've just been describing um but it sort of fits within the overall theme of the exhibition in terms of um experimenting with these different forms of photography and these early forms of photography um and it's interesting as well. So the subject matter as has been described by Will and a beautiful sort of blue um kind of almost underwater like scene and it comes from photographs that Izabela took of another work of hers which is called Apparent distance um uh and as the work was de-installed from an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and that work was um a beautiful uh very large scale installation that was about three and a half metres tall and 20 metres long, where Izabela printed onto the fabric.
Will McRostie:
You say 20 metres? Wow.
Elle Hale:
That's right it was a massive body of work and really really stunning and that and that was all um scenery that um Izabela took photographs uh while she was diving off the coast of, I hope I pronounce this properly, Yonaguni in Japan um and there's a subterranean ancient monument um sort of in the water there, whose origins are disputed so Izabela was um diving and taking photographs of that and had them printed onto fabric and installed um at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and then this particular work that we're describing now um is just a photograph as that other work was de-installed and as the curtain sort of was dropped um from the wall. She captured these photos that have almost a little bit of blurry sense of motion um and you kind of get a sense of curves in fabric um captured as well.
So I guess it kind of um goes back to her dislocating images from their original source, like it's a work made out of work which is an interesting thing to do, um and almost yeah I feel like with Izabela's work it keeps coming back to this playing around with what you can do with photography and um and that sort of thing and so as you've mentioned well she created them um during lockdown with her children in the park um with this cyanotype method, but I’ll before I let Danica go into that process, I’ll just mention that um she had to be a little bit reliant on the weather when she was creating these kind of contact prints and she described how they fly away while she's trying to print using the sun and um and she kept religiously checking her phone um on the weather app to see what the weather was going to be like at the time and it reminded her of checking the weather app when she was um creating the original work that she photographed to create this work um apparent distance she was checking the conditions for diving and that sort of thing, so they kind of linked in that way as well.
Will McRostie:
Yeah cool. Danica do you want to tell us a little bit about cyanotype?
Danica Chappell:
Yeah absolutely, so um a canotype um is a um again a historical uh photographic process that um first was become well was made famous by botanist Anna Atkins who um she put together a book of British algae, so documenting cameralessly in the photogram method um by laying uh botanical species onto uh sensitized uh cyanotype paper um in order to expose um the cyanotype it needed to go out into the sun, so candlelight or tungsten light doesn't really affect this process it needs the UV light and strong UV light, because it's so slow to react in terms of um the speed of the exposure so it takes a long time um to react and to be I guess uh to receive uh the exposure from the sun. The reason it appears blue is because it has uh a ferric iron um basis to it so again it has a metal base to the chemical compounds um but this time it's iron which leaves this blue um trace once it's uh interacted with the sun. It's a fairly um, although some of the compounds include a cyanide in the mix, it is actually once those compounds are mixed together it's a two-part process of sensitising once those compounds are mixed together it's fairly safe in terms of its toxicity and it means that to fix the image you just rinse it out in water so coating uh a paper well actually you can coat on many things from fabrics to papers to timbers with this uh substance, um but once it's exposed um washing it out and fixing it is just simply by washing out the excess unexposed um cyanotype solution and then it turns into this really beautiful cobalt rendering of the image. The more light that hits and exposes, the deeper the richer the blue uh becomes. So sometimes uh it can be hours out in the sun depending upon if it's cloudy uh or the type of day, sometimes it can just be a matter of minutes and then you know that the exposure is complete. It's really weather dependent.
Will McRostie:
Good to hear that it's safe, because I always thought of like the cyanide-based ones as being quite dicey for an artist.
Danica Chappell:
Well I mean photography and their processes can be quite dicey uh there's a lot of toxicity in some of the processes um, but once you know I mean of course you have to handle them safely.
Ramona:
I think Danica you've answered the question, I was wondering about what blue so it will when you said lighter blue then darker blue I was thinking oh but it's I I’ve seen colours before and I really appreciate really good like um some comparisons or descriptions of cold water sky navy, junior navy yeah …
Danica Chappell:
Yves Klein blue
Ramona:
Don't know that one.
Danica Chappell:
Oh sorry um but really rich, rich blues that and they can go into a navy depending upon uh how much like how much um cyanotype solution you coat the paper with um I’ve actually done a couple of experiments where I’ve um made an image with sonotype and then re dried the dried the image off and then re-coated to make multi-layered sort of uh abstractions with sonar type and then you can get this build-up of really deep dark navies um when you've got the paper sort of really saturated, but it does take that a long time for that to have to take effect with the exposure.
Ramona:
So Will was saying the upper part was a lighter blue, would that be more like a sky blue, or a royal blue, or like the blue of a public swimming pool, that type of blue, or ink blue?
Will McRostie:
I’d say I was just thinking about how to capture I think the top part I mean it's not exactly uh exactly a shade but for me the top part is like a Sydney beach blue and the bottom part is like a Melbourne beach blue.
Ramona:
I’m talking about the skies or the water.
Will McRostie:
Yeah Sydney everything's a bit brighter and things like the water is a bit it's definitely not that super aqua marine blue that you get at a swimming pool it's my I would say it's much more kind of oceanic and yeah okay in quality.
Ramona:
How do you spell Cynotype.
Will McRostie:
That's right yes checking my own script thank you no worries. Any other questions before we move on?
Wonderful I think there's like such a great echo, like Elle what you were saying about photos of photos of photos and kind of re and re and reinterpreting reality is a wonderful echo of the camera obscura which was very much utilised to try and capture reality um so you know photography as an art form you know has this history of that started in a very kind of like we are trying to faithfully render the world and capture the world, that then develops through all of these different amazing creative ways to kind of recreate and refactor reality, which I think is a wonderful segue into Danica's work.
And we're going to enter the wonderful world of yet more colour, so much colour um so the first work that we're going to address by Danica is called Eye Glass (for Glass Eye) and it's a work that's roughly 50cm wide and 70cm tall and made of a sheet of light sensitive paper. The length of paper is being held away from the wall of the gallery by a bar of white steel at the top and two more steel stays. At each of the bottom corners, the paper is curled at the top and bottom edges as if it's been cut from a large roll. The left edge is straight, while the right edge is undulating and uneven, as if it's been roughly torn to size the paper's surface is white and glossy and is crowded with glassy coloured forms. Overlapping shards of pink blue green and green create a busy roughly rectangular field of colour. In addition, different patterns create jarring textures thick regular bars of overlapping colour or a tight field of dots. Danica, what are we looking at here? What are the objects that you have used to create this wonderful kind of light collage?
Danica Chappell:
Great, great question. I work uh in a colour dark room or this this work was made in a colour dark room which means that it's completely uh without any light and everything is uh navigated by touch and again using a photogram application where I’m casting shadows onto a surface of the paper.
I am using things that come to hand that I think might leave an interesting colour or interesting trace of an object. The objects that I’m using here are generally found discarded objects um and they're also um negatives of positives, so off cuts from manufacturing objects um that I’ve sort of thought might make an interesting shape. Within this image there is also the use of uh slide images which you'll get to shortly so they are also again the reverse of the actual as the title suggests Eye Glass (for Glass Eye) there is this play on reversal and a negative and a positive which is embedded in this photogrammed work. The materials that are incorporated in here the physical materials that I have used um there is um some Perspex, there is some some cardboard there is um the lens from a headlight that I found on the side of the road after obviously a you know a bumper traffic accident and then I’m also using an enlarger as well as external torches and flashes to bring light in it's a vibrant geometric abstraction of a kaleidoscopic array of colour into mesh with some lines and textures from other materials.
Will McRostie:
And so you're assembling these images and collages completely in the dark, so you're not really able to perceive exactly what the final product is going to be until you've actually exposed the paper and developed it?
Danica Chappell:
That's correct, I do a fair amount of testing of materials um to see what timing and colour can be produced from those materials and from different yeah different densities different colour combinations and filtration systems, so I do a fair amount of testing and then slowly over time I construct the composition in my mind, in my sketchbook and then try and introduce that to the surface of the paper, but from all of that planning because everything is coming together across a long duration of time, it's hard to know exactly where things land and it's all done by the fingertip touch. So where I think something has been exposed and I place something else on top to add another exposure, there is sometimes this misalignment which adds to that geometric obstruction.
Will McRostie:
Yeah, because it's the bars and stripes that you've kind of used to create texture in they have they they're slightly off-kilter they're not quite horizontal they're not quite vertical um and the field of dots in the in the lower right hand corner of the image as well is slightly off, so it's all got a very hand assembled feel to it, it doesn't it's not precise and perfect but it looks very kind of human in how it's made.
Danica Chappell:
Yeah and for me it's important that that um bodily element that my haptic touch my movement in the dark my uh sensibility of surface um is left um available to see uh, so that the edge of the paper that is cut nice and straight that might have been the start of the role I can't remember but the edge that is um wobbly is where I might have you know missed with the blade that I’m using in the dark and I just you know cut it off fairly quickly, but then it's important for me to keep the honesty of that in the work that reveals that my body is then somehow translated into the geometric abstraction.
Will McRostie:
Any questions from the floor?
Ramona:
I’m a little bit unclear as to what whether you what you described is the image of the actual objects such as the lenses and the glasses and everything on the paper, or is the paper the thing that's in the gallery is that the image of what was produced by light or the technique through those objects?
Danica Chappell:
That's a great question Ramona. The work that's in the gallery is basically a trace of all of those objects that have been laid on top of the surface in a similar way to Izabela Pluta's photogramming technique this is another photogrammic application however it's done with colour sensitive like colour light sensitive substrates which mean they have to be handled in complete pitch black uh darkness of my dark room and um it means then that I can't fully make things aligned how I’m using my mind's eye to go well that I think that was there and I’m using my sense of touch to you know navigate the surface of the entire artwork of 50cm by 70cm.
Ramona:
And so I presume the technique then you are in a dark room but then you have flashes of light as you generate the light to generate the image?
Danica Chappell:
That's correct yes.
Ramona:
And over time, have you with that technique have you found that your mental mapping of a spatial relationship between the objects and your sense of touch or one or the other has improved?
Danica Chappell:
Yes absolutely I’ve found um there's been a march effect actually in terms of um how I lay everything out in the studio I have to make sure that um I know where the cutting blades are, they stay in the same spot I know where the materials are. Sometimes uh it's tricky to know I might pick up something that's yellow but the surface of the yellow and the blue will be identical, so I might mistake things around um and then get these lovely crossovers of colours which I didn't sort of plan for um but then also I’m learning about um how these um objects and materials interact with time and density and movement, so the mental mapping I think also goes into what the material of photography, what the materials that I use in the dark room the depth um of time and the depth of the materials that I use in photography, so those light sensitive substrates if that makes sense um but oddly enough I’m also I feel that I have um an acute hearing um so I can hear things that are really, really soft just in every day so um which I think is um you know another sort of thing that has evolved over the last 15 years of working in these darkened spaces.
Ramona:
It's by being more aware of your yeah your sensitivity. The colours the colours are they um would you call them Will, would you call them bright vivid colours or are they like looking through like or they're more like icy pole colours or baby colours powder colours?
Will McRostie:
The word I keep coming back to for these the two words I come back to are glossy yeah um so um very uh very kind of shiny and clear and translucent um and like almost like candy yeah um with that feeling of like hard um toffee candy that might have been coloured um artificially or naturally I’m not gonna tell you which way to do it um but there's definitely kind of a it's very bright and it's definitely got a shininess to it, but Danica you were telling us that through this process so these colours are actually the inverse they're the opposite of the actual objects?
Danica Chappell:
Yes create the image particularly in this um uh Eye Glass (for Glass Eye) piece because it's actually on paper the paper is designed to receive a negative in an enlarger and everything in my process for the last 10 years has been to disrupt and um push against the conventions of the photograph and so I’m actually not using a negative to turn it into a positive so these are actually negative colours, so the oppositional colours to what they actually appear so if something is green uh then it was a purple to begin with. If something is purple, then it was green um if something was blue um then the uh actual object is yellow um it works off of a subtractive uh colour wheel
Will McRostie:
That blows my mind that's really cool.
Ramona:
Wow.
Danica Chappell:
Which is different to the to the indexing work.
Will McRostie:
Yes well let's talk about that one um which is the final work that we're going to discuss um and as Danica said so this uses an opposite process where the colours represented in the image are accurate to the colours of the objects that created the image, correct Danica?
Danica Chappell:
That's correct yes.
Will McRostie:
So in this in this final work, a horizontal bar of wood spans two metres of the gallery wall at head height and it's got four grooves carved down its length. Seven transparency sheets are slotted into the grooves side by side and jutting out perpendicular to the wall they've been precisely folded and these thin sheets are supported in places by wooden pegs or chips that have been used to wedge them into the grooves. Each of the transparency sheets features a riotous assembly of glassy colours. On the plastic of the transparency, the colours are thick and syrupy like coloured candy orange, yellow and green are prominent in the mix, with some cooler blue highlights. Small square spotlights shine down on the work from the gallery ceiling catching each of the transparencies and throwing a projection of the colours on its surface onto the white gallery wall. Below the angle of the light stretches and distorts each image so they seem to hang below the timber bar twisted as if frozen in time while rustled by a strong breeze the colours take on a softer quality in the projections, compared to on the transparency sheets as if it's been watered down slightly above the timber bar on the wall filaments of white light are reflected onto the wall where light is being reflected off the shiny folded edges of the transparency sheets. There's a lot of moving parts in this one.
Danica Chappell:
That's a lovely description, Will, thank you.
Will McRostie:
Oh no worries. Did it make sense? I feel like this is a quite a complicated one do we need to go over any of it again?
Ramona:
It made sense to me and I think it sounded beautiful, it actually sounds like a colour waterfall almost.
Will McRostie:
That is a great description! You are coming for my gig Ramona! Yes like the colours of the transparencies are kind of spilling over this um horizontal bar on the wall onto the gallery - that's great!
So these are made in a similar fashion so you're using these similar collections of found objects Danica to create these kind of collages of colour but using a different process so these are transparencies as opposed to photograms.
Danica Chappell:
That's right, that's right Will um these are um what the material is um an 8 inch by 10 inch sheet of film transparent film um and people may know this from um slide like family slides that used a slide projector and projected an image uh taken from a 35mm camera onto a wall. This is a larger version of that material that would fit into um a large format camera which is 8 inches by 10 inches and again I haven't used a camera here, I’m working with shadows of objects and colours to capture an array of kaleidoscopic apparitions that intermesh with each other to form you know new colours so um where they overlap um there are dark sections to the slides and actually the slide is activated really by this the gallery lights by themselves if they were laying flat.
It would be hard to see the image because it does take light to then be able to produce the image which is that projection onto the wall um but because I’ve folded and pinched them into place and taken them off the wall, your body can then interact with the space and look through uh certain sections to see in part those details. They're a little um stained glass window-esque with its translucency um but they're uh definitely also entrenched in that modernist avant-gardist, cubist type abstraction in their geometry
Will McRostie:
And in the process of making this particular installation do you make each of these for the space that it's going to inhabit specifically?
Danica Chappell:
So the collection um is now sitting at well actually I have to recount so I did make 20 new slides or 22 new slides for uh Reconfigured/Rediscovered um but I had first started working with this material in this way in 2014 one piece I know for sure has ended up in um uh Eye Glass (for Glass Eye) so it was cut up and used for its values for that work and over time from the original series I have sort of used portions for other works for other exhibitions um so the configuration is in negotiation with each other for each installation.
Will McRostie:
But drawing on the same body of uh objects that you're collection over time.
Danica Chappell:
Yes and yeah that's right and um because I you know the opportunity to um interact with the lights that I know that Town Hall had, it was a good opportunity to extend this work uh for this exhibition um and to …
Will McRostie:
I was going to ask how finicky you had to be with the lighting designer to get everything just right?
Danica Chappell:
Um we had fun didn't we Elle?
Elle Hale:
It was it was very it was it was fun yes I’ve never worked um I’ve never worked with an artist that creates work like this where the um the lighting in the gallery is such an integral part almost half of the work would be gone if it wasn't met.
Danica Chappell:
Yeah the first installation that I did in 2014 didn't have it had just natural light coming through so the shadows weren't the projected images weren't as strong but I knew that they were there it's kind of like going back to Robyn Stacey's uh camera obscura it takes the correct lighting conditions of the room in order to see the projected image um and you know this is kind of similar in that way that it takes the right lighting conditions to illuminate the slides onto the wall but we were having uh some interesting effects with um the overlapping of some of the gallery lights where they would make double ups of the one slide and you know this kind of a double exposure or double projection onto the wall of the same image in part, so it's a confusing confounding work to describe I guess but it's um the projections appear as if um like a stained glass window that you're looking through a stained glass window.
Will McRostie:
A very modern very cool stained glass window. Any questions?
Ramona:
Could I ask um Danica what you're um coming back I guess to Pete's original question what would be your intent or your motivation um or maybe yeah what's your motivation is? Is it a message or is it playing with art or colour and maybe it changes according to which artwork your which piece you're working on?
Danica Chappell:
That's a great question thank you for asking. I guess about 10 years ago when I undertook my masters I really wanted to leave photography behind and um had um this desire to abstract space and light I guess um but then you know photography is an abstraction of space and light um but it was always I guess my desire that you know I’m this failed painter, so slowly through that body of work and that research I really sort of just discounted the camera in the mix and I actually really embraced um the dark room and photography uh because that's where my foundation years were was in in the dark room, you know enlarging and learning the process of making a print and making an image and so I guess for me um the realization of light sensitivity is the like at the roots the core investigation and then making it sort of um the exposure stretch and the processes stretch over time and give them this sort of elasticity to what they can do and what I can do with them um they're really sort of about uh putting myself embedded into the photograph in a way I guess I’m trying to treat them like a painting trying to treat them like a sculpture but using uh light sensitivity and light as that main mode of making and communicating that um I do have um a strong affinity to for his photogramming techniques that he did it uh divulging and invite divides over his making process and the Bauhausian era, where materials could be more than just the material itself it could have its other language. For me I really sort of repel against the conventions of what um photography is and the processes that they're prescribed to do and I try and put my hand in there and pull something out that is more my language with light sensitivity if that makes sense.
Ramona:
It does thank you and it's interesting I think your comments about having you as part of the communication like you're talking about the rough knife edge, that's part of you or authenticity or I guess it's your it's more you than your initial signing the artwork I guess in a way?
Danica Chappell:
Yeah it it's um revealing the honesty of those materials as well and really um revealing the honesty of the making that this is um very much um in a space that I can't control I can't um you know a painter might be able to wipe off the surface of a mark if they aren't quite happy with it well I can't once the light hits that light sensitive substrate it's a mark and it's not erasable. The only erasure is then to turn it into black and saturated with light um but for me I guess that just leaves this sort of slippery and elastic approach to photography that is like there's infinite amount of colour that I could combine together in colour photography um but then also I guess I’ve gone into historical processes like the daguerreotype and the wet plate colour carbon to then figure out um the position of history for photography and to figure out all of those processes that superseded each other.
Ramona:
Wow thank you.
Will McRostie:
And I think such a wonderful kind of endpoint from you know the camera obscure and the preoccupation with precision and the idea of capturing the real and then leaving that behind and going all the way to beautiful illustrative abstractions of just playing with colour and light for its own sake, rather than trying to kind of bend it to the purpose of something else I think it's great.
Danica Chappell:
Thank you.
Will McRostie:
Any other questions or thoughts or comments? Well that was our last work and I think we're practically approaching our 3.30 scheduled finish time look at us go um so I might uh hand back to Elle to wrap us up.
Elle Hale:
Thanks Will um I’m impressed, wow we still have seven minutes to go! Thank you um thanks everyone for joining us today um thanks will for taking us on this fantastic audio focus tour of the exhibition and thank you Danica for sharing all of your knowledge with us and um teaching us a little a little bit more about your process as well and um and how you make it works it's been wonderful thank you and to um to those tuning in um please consider um maybe joining our digital community by signing up to the E-newsletter via the City of Boroondara website which is www.boroondara.vic.gov.au/arts and you can find out more information about Town Hall Gallery and Boroondara arts events and activities online.
The exhibition is on until the 10th of April that's a Saturday and we're open from um 12 to 4 Monday to Saturday so um there's still time to drop in and visit if you're interested and um shortly after the session we'll be sending around um just a short survey to tell us about your experience and we'd really love your feedback because we're looking at doing some more of these sessions going into the future as well so um that would be wonderful and once again thanks for tuning in and I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend, thank you.
Will McRostie:
Thanks for being such an engaged audience.
Pete Sumner:
Thank you, it's been a wonderful experience.
Ramona:
Yeah I’ve really enjoyed it and learnt a lot, I never thought I never thought of this sort of photography without a camera and I think my family are full of artists but they're all painting and I thought if I was sighted, I’d be into photography so I’ve really enjoyed it and learnt a lot so thank you.
Danica Chappell:
Thanks so much for your important and your questions and yeah.
Ramona:
Thank you for the show too much I wanted to give everyone no thank you okay bye for now bye-bye thanks everyone thanks bye-bye thank you everybody bye-bye thanks Peter.