DARK CHAMBER (in development)
My work has been preoccupied with archives. I have delved into the Adamson Collection of artworks created in historic mental health hospital settings at the Wellcome Library, in collaboration with Outside In, and researched the lives of Victorian patients at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives through casebooks, reports, and photographs. My 2025 work, Rage Reactor, was galvanised by the book 10%: Concerning the Image Archive of a Nuclear Research Centre, leading me to develop a visual culture entangling the toxic, murky archives of family photographs and videos with that of the nuclear industry. I combined analogue slides and overhead projection, throwing familial/industrial archival images onto semi-transparent plastic tarpaulin while activating the space through performance.
In November 2025 at Artsadmin, I began developing a new work entangling performance and photography, not as performance to camera, but as an active exchange in which both image and performer co-exist as collaborators. The title Dark Chamber is a literal translation from the Latin camera obscura, around which the work is centred. For Fist Inside The Velvet Glove, I will build a camera obscura installation, inside and outside of which I will perform. Playing with notions of fixity and fidelity within photographs, whilst illuminating the chemical and physical surface tensions between light and light-sensitive materials.
In the room, I will utilise the camera obscura and projectors to play with the plane of visibility on different surfaces, be it bodily or material. I will throw and animate images throughout the room using mirrors, like a photo-physics laboratory experiment, reflecting (on) the archive quite literally. This exploration of prepared and fixed images activating photons, refraction, and diffraction to consider the gaps in an archive, what an image does not capture, and how an image degrades through transformation and duplication. Large prints of archival images could be placed outside the camera obscura to be projected into the space, becoming a staged image with printed bodies and lively bodies intermingling and inverting through the simple pinhole in the window.
Another way of forging images in this work is through cyanotype printing. I will coat cotton coveralls with a cyanotype solution, then bathe the room in “safe” red light to form a darkroom. I will affix acetate negatives of images from the archive to the coveralls. In this contact printing suit, I will step outside the camera obscura to become visible through the lens, appearing inside the room in an inverted projection while exposing the negatives to sunlight. Holding poses and gestures found in the archive, extending images into an action score of exposure. I will re-enter to finally expose the images using UV sun lamps to “tan”, ensuring good exposure for image printing. Using cyanotype is a historic, accessible, and comparatively low-toxicity process that addresses the toxicity and legacy of images, whether digital or photochemical - while cyanotype is archival (the first photobook to exist was made using cyanotype photograms by botanist Anna Atkins) it remains light and chemically sensitive - being an interesting medium to wrangle with the notions of time, degradation, and longevity particularly in this dialogue with live art documentation images.
The final step in this process of my body carrying this archive is one of washing. After removing the acetate negatives from the coveralls, I will bathe in a tray of water to wash away the unactivated chemistry, which reveals and “prints” the latent image. Considering the archive like the halide crystals of a photograph - these photographs being the trace an action has left, and all that isn't captured is washed away, carried off elsewhere, beyond the archive, outside it, in memory, waterways, land, and bodies.
The archival collage coveralls will then be dried, suspended in the space like a photograph in a darkroom, and once dry, becoming part of the tactileBOSCH archive.