My good friend and fellow artist Nici Bungey has cajoled me into submitting a piece to the Summer Exhibition at the RA.
Nici set me the task of printing my best print of a cuttlefish, working in both Cyanotype and Salt. My chemical wet bench has never been so busy. The learning curve has been extraordinary. There is absolutely no substitute for time and practice at the steep end of the curve. There have been extraordinarily supportive texts back and forward to my new friend Peter Moseley who applies his own Mosely Magic from a distance.
The theme of the RA’s Summer Show this year is ‘Re-finding Magic’. I guess partly because the pandemic has lost us a little of life’s magic, and partly because art can be magical, the title reflects an artistic need to look at what brings magic to our lives.
In this context I want to explore (and get my thoughts straight before I hit the heady heights of the selection process and then the podium!) why I picked my cuttlefish, why this cuttlefish photograph, and why is it re-found magic.
This is my piece, titled ‘The Alchemic Cuttlefish’.
So called for:
- it’s ability to use colour and light to camouflage in life
- how magical and extraordinary is a creature that jet-pulses water to swim, raises families, and has an ink used for millennia used by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci.
- how differently it forms after death
- silver nitrate is an alchemist’s chemical, part of the early Royal Society’s pharmacopoeia and search by scientists of the Enlightenment for immortality. Alchemy and science and magic might have been the early photographers holy trinity. Alchemists were concerned with the transmutation of matter, particularly into gold. And immortality.
- salt prints, for this is that, were a British invention by Fox-Talbot and used between 1839 -1860. The alchemy is in the salt and the silver reacting in sunlight to create a print. Tricky, elusive, magical.
- how the print transformed from a chemical coated surface to an image forever remains magical to me. Old photographic techniques give us warm papers and a depth and intensity of contrast not found on Instagram or giclee prints. The process has many, slow steps which allows time to think and reflect. Refinding the magic of photography. Becoming inky to refind oneself.
- the cuttlefish has a last swim in a water wash to stabilise the print. I love the romance in this idea, the closing of the circle.
- the cuttlefish, possibly ending life as a parrot nibble, has found immortality through becoming an image. The calcium layers it lays down are a visual landscape to explore, the process highlighting the topography of its physical form in life.
- salt prints are not always stable. There is a chance this print might fade. A final camouflage. The magic refound, and lost.
- when my technique improves these cuttlefish will be printed with salt water from the harbour and toned in gold. Alchemy and magic have gone hand in hand.
I hope you like my entry. I hope you can see sense in the title.
Wish me some Alchemist’s luck, if there is such a thing. I think there is.