Artist statement: ‘Colour fall’ takes inspiration from hand-tinted daguerreotypes. Fusing realist pictorial painting and photography, hand colourists applied a patina of colour and gold with delicate application and needle point precision to the surface of daguerreotypes, wet-plate processes and later, silver gelatin prints. When looking at a hand-tinted daguerreotype under a microscope, the pigments appear to cling to the plate’s surface in large smears and oblong globules. In my darkroom process, the light-sensitive substrate lies in stasis where properties of form and density are determined by the fall of the light and the agitation of shadows. ‘Colour fall’ renders colour in the first instance as tone while hand-applied dyes and pastels skin the surface, nudging at the contrast and asserting a play with the eye.
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Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
