Liquid Now: Experimental & Expanded Photography Exhibition

in connection with Bristol Photography Festival: The World a Wave

at Kit Form Gallery, Jamaica Street,  Stokes Croft, Bristol

Opening: Wednesday 13 November 2024,  6-8pm – exhibition continues until 17 November, 11am-6pm 

Events & Workshops: (full details below)

  • Thursday 14, 1-4pm – Phytogram Workshop – Plant printing with Sophie Sherwood from Bristol Darkroom
  • Friday 15, 10.30-1pm – Abstract Film Documents Workshop – Create a short film with a photographic approach with Deborah Weinreb
  • Saturday 16,  from 7pm – Closing Event: Artists’ Talk & Performances with exhibiting artists  

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Melanie Clifford, Sarah Rose Currie, Katie Davies, Melissa Edwards, Sam Francis, Claudia Pilsl, Mars Saude, Sophie Sherwood, Deborah Weinreb

‘Liquid Now’ brings together artists working with experimental and expanded photography by questioning the dominant photographic medium and its materiality. 

As investigations driven by curious minds, the exhibited work looks beyond representation and raises questions about time and what it means to be alive within these liquid times. 

The techniques and practices exhibited range from film and digital photography, to performance, installation, projection, and moving image, through to alternative forms of image making such as phytograms, cyanotypes, and thermal prints. With increasing liquidity, stability and order no longer have any place and the only certainty is change and impermanence. 

From diverse historical material ranging from Weinreb’s screen pieces of early 80’s China, to Pilsl’s cyanotypes made from her father’s images of a family gathering. Davies’s installation ‘Speaker’ reflects on a North Korean Propaganda village while Clifford works with light and sound exploring our perception of stillness, flicker and illusory motion. Currie shows us explorations of quiet shadows of Japan and Sherwood’s site- specific work looks at relationships with the local flora of Stokes Croft, while Francis presents 35mm prints of plants close-up.  Edwards works with a range of mixed techniques while Saude applies the experimental film tradition of the somatic camera to an autistic bodymind. 

ARTIST INFO

Melissa Edwards: Light and Time warped (2024)

A series of images created at Supernormal festival at Braziers Park, in Oxfordshire using a DSLR pinhole camera, and further altering the images by using a manual shutter release control and movement. 

Mars Saude: Stim Stills (2024)

These durational colour photographs use movements from moving image to create long-exposure still images. This iteration of an ongoing project explores the experimental film tradition of the somatic camera in relation to an autistic bodymind. Movements of Saude’s stimming body distort and blur the landscape and seascape, foregrounding the status of photochemical still film as a time-based medium. 

Claudia Pilsl: Never the Same River (2024)

To me photographs are like rivers that swell and change with each viewing. Whilst being looked at they are constantly reconstituting themselves as reflective fragments of past moments within a present context. Harboring near invisible triggers that wreak havoc with linearity, they liquify time and release a stream of fleeting thoughts and memories within the here and now. The photographs explored within this series of cyanotypes were taken by my father at a family-gathering in Austria. Looking at my young self picking grapes, I feel a connection to my oblique migrant roots that stretch to a warmer climate where wine grows easily.

Deborah Weinreb: China: Around and About 1984

Mining my archives and looking at a way to reveal elements of the past in a digital present.  It is time to dig into bygone eras when photography was less prevalent and more material. Beginning with photographs from early 80’s China when cars were rare and the first televisions were just appearing as I left. 

Sam Francis: Photo-synthesis (2024)

Part of a wider project exploring the inter-relationships with plant life in conversation with the colour green, and the (im)possibilities of human photosynthesis. 35mm prints of close-up, close-in images of plants will be displayed. 

Melanie Clifford:  Light & sound, thrown & interrupted, Kitform (2024)

Light, film, sound, paper and glass installation with Kitform as living subject and screen, exploring our sensation and perception of time and stillness. 35mm time lapse photography hand-printed to 16mm film and projected above and below fusion thresholds. Site-specific field-recording compositions on lathe-cut dubplates, played by hand.

Sophie Sherwood: St Matthias Park

This site specific work looks at the local flora surrounding a small area of Bristol City Centre called St Matthias Park. The main street, lined with a row of plane trees, is a favourite of the artist. St Matthias replaced Judas, and the area has become a spot of reflection on spirituality, transformation, recovery, and learning to embrace the shadow self. 

Katie Davies: Speaker 

“Remember, once you get to The Demilitarized Zone, there is no more De.”
– David Palmer, Public Affairs Specialist for the US Forces Korea

Politics is very much about how spaces are structured or how time is regimented. Using audio and image collected from research within the Korean DMZ, ‘Speaker’ presents Gijeong-dong, a North Korean Propaganda village within the north side of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Here at the DMZ, the regiments of time and the structure of space serve to highlight the durational aspect of this constant breakdown and highly elaborate form of representing an antagonism that won’t go away.

Sarah Rose Currie: Of Shadows 

“…though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.”― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

After a trip to Japan, I was struck by the shadows everywhere that felt softly and intentionally formed to encourage looking more closely and experiencing all spaces. They appeared to make sense of absence, to celebrate the dark alongside the light, giving it the dignity and attention it deserves. Working in the darkroom allows me to utilise light and shadow to make sense of the images I brought back with me. 

WORKSHOP INFO

Suggested donation £10 payable in cash on the day.

  • Thursday 14, 1-4pm – Phytogram Workshop – Painting with chemistry & plants with Sophie Sherwood from the Bristol Darkroom

Using vitamin C tablets and washing soda, participants will learn how to make light sensitive chemistry to make relief prints using foraged leaves from the area onto photographic film. The chemigram is a painterly process, using phytogram chemistry, fixer, and resists like Vaseline. In the second part of the workshop, you will learn how to create your own chemigrams, and build up layers using other techniques, such as lumen printing. The phytogram process was created by artist Karel Doing. To attend email: photosophiaus@gmail.com 

  • Friday 15, 10.30-1pm – Abstract Film Documents Workshop – Create a short photographic film with Deborah Weinreb

Participants will venture out into the surrounding area to take a series of ‘photographs’ of between 1 to 3 seconds – not a fraction of a second as with the still photographic  image. You will then edit these into a short ‘document.’ Please bring a mobile phone with a film function, and ideally iMovie or similar editing app, although this is not essential.  To attend email: dwphotoart@mac.com 

————–       

Bristol Photography Festival ‘The World a Wave’ 

The world never stands still, it is always in the process of unfolding and becoming otherwise. Any given moment can be understood as a momentary congregation; of bodies, matters, histories, dreams and ideas. For the second edition we will focus on the theme of movement, drawing attention to global currents and flows, as well as fleeting and ephemeral encounters.