Cyanotypes and Letterpress

I mase my first cyanotype prints while at a residency in Medicine Hat Alberta. I was staying is a historic house called the Ewart-Duggan house. The space was furnished with the basics and my curious I looked through all the drawers, most were empty but one held a box of handkerchief and a beautiful overshot linen shawl. Isn’t it so often the life of a textile to be folded up and placed away on shelves and hiden in drawers. I wanted to document these textiles but especially the folded crease. I really related to the ideas presented in the Mitchell and Blakey article when I think about these cyanotypes. The idea of intuitively knowing to fold cloth a certain way- following the folds of the past. The idea of emplacement and how it’s embodies you. These cyanotypes are also toned, so the tadeonal blue colour is bleached from the paper and I toned it with tannins to make the purpleish brown.

 It is with my object making I intend to allow remnants of these stories to remain in our consciousness and habitually persist in the present day. I wield the metaphor of haunting in my work through the use of presence and absence. Processes like cyanotype printing are achieved because of absence. Cyanotype prints use light to preserve the negative details of an object, the process preserves the trace an object leaves behind.