If you can make it to Woking (about ½-hour train ride from London) in the next month (from 13th January to 11th of February) please come to the Lightbox to see the University for the Creative Arts’ MFA Photography Year 2 show. I’d be happy to meet you almost anytime during the month to talk about my work.
A couple of weeks ago I went to see the opening of Professor Wendong Ren’s show, “Ink,” at the University. Interesting and beautiful images hung on canvas scrolls along the wall. I asked him a question about his methods, and he graciously took me over and showed me the brush type he uses and described the painting process, the type of paper and how it’s made in a 3,000-year-old Chinese process (that Japanese imitators can’t match, he was at pains to explain to me). He also explained to me about the chops (red-ink stamps) on some of the images. The first is the initials of his name, another appeared to be something about moonlight, under which he likes to work. Before I left his assistant took a picture of me with him in front of some of the works shown above. Beautiful!
Sitting in the cafeteria at school I noticed this young woman at the next table, fully enjoying her style and her companion projecting his (see below). They kindly consented to be photographed while they carried on their conversation.
As a lunch-time exercise in a workshop, I took this suggestive, close-up picture, abstracting it from its context, seen better to the left.
University for the Creative Arts, Farnham
Wai Yi is in the Fine Art MA program and was on an presentation team with me back in the Fall. Her Temple of Time was an intense experience at the UCA Grad Show in late August. Check her Instagram (@waiyi.chung.art/) to see some reels on the effort that went it to making it that I’ve been following for the last little while.
Wai Yi Chung, Temple of Time (2023)
Immersive installation space.
3.5 × 3.8 × 2.4 m.
Acrylic, enamel, emulsion paint,
MDF board, timber, muslin, one-way mirror film.
Most of the University is off limits to students over the summer bu the library is still open. Leaving it one cloudy day I saw this shot of the dramatic sky through a kind of skylit walkway with the actual sky above and quickly grabbed a couple of shots. I then walked through the quad and saw another, kind of ominous view, below.
Last night the members of my MFA Photography course at UCA opened a weekend show of some of our work to date at the local Barn Bistro (see videos below). I focused on the work I’ve been doing on inequality with a new collage of one of the images I showed here earlier and some of my Lego constructions of inequality statistics. Click any image to see them enlarged. (If that doesn’t work in email, click the post title to open in a browser first.)
Coming to Farnham, 16th – 18th of June. If you’re in the area, please stop by next weekend to see a group show with my fellow MFA Photography students. (Click to enlarge or, if seeing this in email, click the post title, “New Show” first.)
In the same camera-making class mentioned in my last post, Peter Renn turned the room itself into a camera obscura (a dark room) with a large single lens you can see in the first image. It has a focal length of something between 1000 and 2000mm, casting a massive image circle. In the first picture above you can see the lens and part of the image on the floor. In the next couple of images you can see different parts of the image transmissively through a large, hand-held roll of tracing paper bringing different parts of the image into focus by moving back and forth. Next we used a large foam stage flat, and I took pictures of different parts of the image projected onto it. Click any of the pictures to see them all full-sized.
We had a fantastic camera-building workshop with Peter Renn a couple of weeks ago. I had bought a cheap 135mm, f/4.5 projector lens in a charity shop for £10 and brought in a shoe box to mount it on. The first two pictures show the final product. The cardboard flaps in the first image allow one to slide the imaging screen backwards and forwards to focus. The next picture shows the inside, a focusing screen which is simply some tracing paper in a cardboard frame. The next 2 pictures I took with my phone through a hole in the back. I made the hole the size of my Fujinon 23mm lens so I can photograph what’s on the focusing screen and maintain a pretty good light seal. The 5th picture is a shot my classmate Marilyn took of me using the camera and the bottom right picture is the first image I took digitally. Click any of the pictures to see them all full-sized.
As part of a workshop in alternative cameras I took a few shots with an old Canon Powershot A570 which had it’s infrared filter removed and a piece of orange gel taped over the front of the lens. This yielded some interest color IR effects. Click any image to see them all enlarged.
A window looking out on a little courtyard. The smears on the stuff in the window looked like hands rising up to me. The mirror in the bottom image didn’t seem to be able to reflect me, and was angled in such a way as to create a little bit of a trompe l’oeil effect with the glass bowl in the reflection different from the stone bowl in the foreground.
…is a fine place for reflection.
Reflection of the library shelves through the library window an reflected back onto it from the building opposite.
Four of my classmates and I had just completed our final presentations for Exploratory Practice and adjourned to the Graphics Studio to unwind. The afternoon sun was streaming brightly through the western windows and Luna kindly allowed me to shoot a few quick snapshots of her in the golden light.
