Photospace Gallery - New Exhibitions

Photospace Gallery - New Exhibitions

Amelia Pascoe - Capture

Chris Hoult - Gum Oil Prints

9th April-30th April 2011

Opening: Friday 8th April, 5.00-7.00PM

The theme of the two exhibitions in April is the handcrafted nature of the photographs and photography-related jewellery pieces. The Gum Oil process is a 19th century technique, invented at the birth of photography jointly by William Henry Fox Talbot and several others, which does not use silver salts but instead uses colloids such as gum Arabic, which harden in daylight and become insoluble in water.

This led to the slightly more modern process as employed by Chris Hoult, with the result that his photographs take on a painterly, textural quality, and each print is entirely unique. It is not possible to make two prints the same, and each rendition of a photographic negative has its own particular quality. The images are made using the sun as a light source, and that in itself is unpredictable.

These two exhibitions have been timed to cover World Pinhole Day, a US-based initiative that has run a website event and exhibition annually since 2001 (which Photospace has always been involved in). This year, World Pinhole Day is on Easter Sunday, so Photospace Gallery will be open and we'll be running a pinhole camera-making, picture taking workshop on the day, and we expect to be among the first worldwide to upload images to the exhibition site: www.pinholeday.org

As far as I am aware, Amelia is the only jeweller in NZ whose work directly relates to photography. She has crafted from silver, tiny, working pinhole cameras that can be worn as jewellery pieces, and pinhole photographs she has made with these cameras form part of the exhibition.

She has also made pinhole cameras from hollowed out river stones, which are functional photographic devices as well as being beautiful, tactile sculptural pieces.

There is a theme of cryptozoology in the exhibition, which arises from Amelia's time spent working for the Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry, in Biosecurity, where she had to field queries about and claims of sightings of animals that are not supposed to be here (the black panther, for example) or animals known to be extinct (moa, moose). These creatures are sculpted as small silver 3D pieces, photographed with the pinhole cameras in dioramas, and also encapsulated.

ends

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