Light and Trace
Cyanotype series, 2023–2024
Light runs through this work as both subject and method. The cyanotype process — one of the earliest photographic techniques, and the same method used to produce the dockyard's original blueprints — became a way of connecting the building's industrial past with a contemporary artistic practice.
Working with printmaker Sally Tyrie, these pieces investigate how light records, reveals, and transforms. Architectural details from Storehouse 9 were captured using the cyanotype method, producing images that are simultaneously precise and atmospheric — the deep Prussian blue carrying the memory of the exposure.
Process
The discovery of an architectural model of Boathouse 5 inside Storehouse 9 became a catalyst. The model's forms were recorded through cyanotype, its surfaces translated into patterns of light and shadow on treated fabric. Old linen folded blueprints found in the archives connected this process to the building's own history of technical drawing.
The collaboration with Sally Tyrie brought a printmaker's sensitivity to the role of light — its quality, its duration, its capacity to leave a permanent mark. Each piece is a record of a specific moment of exposure, unrepeatable and tied to the conditions of its making.
These textile works weave together pattern, colour, process, and concept. The cyanotype images were developed into a series that moves between documentation and abstraction — some pieces retaining the legibility of architectural drawing, others dissolving into pure tone and texture.
Installed against the raw brick walls of Storehouse 9, the deep blue of the cyanotypes created a visual dialogue with the building’s own palette of browns, greys, and weathered surfaces — a conversation between the precision of photographic chemistry and the entropy of a structure slowly giving way to time.
“The cyanotype doesn’t lie — it records exactly what the light touches, but what it produces feels closer to memory than documentation.”