Home Studio, Entry 2.

Keeping motivated hasn't been the easiest sans structure, but I have found engaging with new media that are doable at home has helped a lot.

I have begun to experiment with Cyanotype printing, exploring the way that it revolves around negative space, similarly to when carving for a woodcut print, one has to see in reverse the desired printed image.

I have been focusing on developing the technique to get a clear, well exposed image, enjoying it's lo-fi, photographic links, using the image of my post-carving hands to practice with since prior to this period of isolation I had begun the process of photo etching this image, but was never able to finish it.

Though the Cyanotype images expose blue, it has been interesting to work with the technique itself, combining it with collage by exposing one image for a short time, then layering over another and exposing the layered images for a further ten minutes or so. This technique was difficult to master, taking many attempts to get a good level of exposure of both layered images, though it produced particularly interesting outcomes, especially when I layered the image of my hands with my traced map of the roads surrounding Trenoweth Quarry. I found that this print merged the themes of mapping and geographies with the materiality of the print and the sense of touch, connoted by the hands, into one cohesive, slightly abstract image.

Alongside developing my techniques of Cyanotype printing, I have been creating digital exhibitions using Photoshop, in order to provide some direction to my visual work, now that there will be no physical degree show. I had planned to curate a joint show with fellow artist Danae Patsalou, so the virtual shows that I developed incorporated both artists work. Though initially this process was awkward and stunted, I have been able to take advantage of this digital platform to fully explore the possibilities of my hypothetical degree show. Working digitally I was able to ignore physics in the more experimental fictitious shows, making a piece of carved limestone into a screen which exudes my film, rather than having to organise the positioning and subsequent disguising of projectors; also massively distorting the size of the work in the show.

Blowing up the size of my granite sculpture had the interesting, highly appropriate effect of emphasising the material qualities of the stone itself, in a show where this haptic materiality was one of the key players. Another interesting result of playing with the possibilities of the fictitious, digital exhibition was the scrunched Cyanotype print of my post-carving hands (top image). This piece builds upon Sculpted, the scrunched hand piece in the bottom image above, not just scrunching the image on paper into a distressed, relief version of the photograph, but taking one step further and making it into an object in itself, poised on a plinth just like Danae's vase. Shaping my hands into a sculpture in this way echoes the way that the process of carving granite 'pushes back' on the carver, impacting on the body with subtle cuts, bruises and aches - I am exaggerating this in distressing the image into a sculptural object.

Though developing digital exhibitions was not quite the same experience as curating a physical one, it has been invaluable in its malleability: the defiance of physics, the ease in switching pieces around, and simply the ability to create endless outcomes where this would not be possible in the limited time we'd have had to set up a physical show.