Shadows of Things

This project is a series of wet specimen portraits, photographed at the Natural History Museum of London. The photographs are put through a photopolymer printmaking process, whereby a negative is created and transferred to a photopolymer plate. These plates are then printed on cotton rag paper, using a letterpress.

The title, ‘Shadows of Things,’ came to me while I was working with the photopolymer process during a residency last year at the Banff Centre, where I was lucky enough to have a week to learn the use of the equipment and spend the remaining time experimenting. Part of the technique involves the washing away of the light-activated resin which is exposed, leaving the faint trace of the image on the plate. It is only when printed that one can see how well the exposure has worked. In the meantime, you work on trust, that the shadows you see in the polymer are indeed what you have tried to create from the original photograph.