Solo Show Birmingham
Birmingham’s Argentea Gallery presented A Thousand Fallen Blossoms in 2021, just as pandemic restrictions were lifting.
Inspired by a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto during the Sakura cherry blossom season, these images sought to convey an immersive experience of Hanami, the traditional Japanese custom of viewing and honouring the transient beauty of cherry blossoms. These artworks convey both the profusion and fragility of the blossom petals from their magnificence on the branch to their life’s end on the ground below.
A Thousand Fallen Blossoms evidenced both photography’s ‘wonderful and magical capacity for exactitude’, and the abstract qualities produced by manipulating photographic negatives. Imitating the ruination of the laden branches when the petals give way to the force of the breeze, I took a holepunch to my colour negatives and created hundreds of tiny discs containing fragments of the original blossoms. Dropping them like ‘negative confetti’ onto the negative holder of the darkroom enlarger echoes the flurry of falling petals. The random and unpredictable fall of the confetti creates a unique composition that is printed only once before repeating the process.
‘There’s something very satisfying about the temporal nature of the subject, which is a mere two-week window of time in Japanese culture; the act of scattering these confetti negatives reflects its essential ephemerality.’
I applied the same technique to photographs of the blue skies framing the blossom and of the rainwater on the ground on which they fell.
Intrigued by the abundance of scattered petals covering the pavements, I also made a series of only 17 black and white images that form the basis of 10,000 Fallen Petals. However, frustrated by the too descriptive nature of the images I applied tiny, Japanese (naturally) stickers to the negatives, individually covering each one that had fallen to the pavement. For each blossom, a sticker; 10,000 in all.
‘the spaces covered by the stickers, which read as white in the printing process, become both an abstraction and a kind of memory of the shape that the petal made on the floor’.
The title of this series references a 17th century Chinese ink painting called 10,000 Ugly Ink Blots by artist and monk Shitao and draws on my knowledge of art history. A hand-bound limited-edition book accompanied the large-scale prints. Structurally mirroring Shitao’s diptych painting, double and triple pages offer beautiful little diptychs and triptychs of the images, complete with a short text by artist, writer and curator Duncan Wooldridge.
