The South Reach

About the artwork

The series was triggered by an accident and inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin%u2019s Earthsea quartet- a chronicle of %u201Cundoing%u201D the %u201Cunmaking.%u201D I corrupted 120mm film while manually rewinding it onto an out-of-production reel of the vintage Kodak Vollenda. In the middle of Scottish Highlands with no other camera or a spare film, I pushed away the thought of what, if anything, would come out of it and kept shooting. I didn%u2019t expect much developing the film, but even so my stomach dropped, as I pulled it out of the water. White stripes run in some unexplainable pattern across it, cutting through the rugged landscape and wiping off everything on their way. The negatives looked surreal and irredeemable. I experimented with the film in darkroom at first creating physical collages from different exposures tests. This print is a photopolymer gravure (KM95 plate) "assembled" from the images created from the same negative.