penelope davis
Penelope Davis employs the ‘cameraless’ technique of the photogram to explore the literal and indexical qualities that are popularly assumed between the photograph and the world. Her works play with photography’s conventions to produce images that are recognisable as photographic but which make the processes of their creation and the origins of their subject matter mysterious. In this way simple assumptions of objectivity, reality and literal depiction are rendered complex.
The objects used in her photograms provide a pivot for issues of commodification, signage and fabrication. Transparent Japanese tissue packets, and other objects moulded and cast in resin such as antique cameras and columns of book spines, are exposed directly onto photographic paper. This slow work results in colour saturated images emphasising the nature of photography as a medium of light and time. Davis’ smaller, ‘traditional’ photographs offer glimpses of the transitional in-between spaces of cluttered urban environments, exploring the metamorphoses that occur between nature and culture, between image and text and between the photograph and its source.
Penelope Davis employs the ‘cameraless’ technique of the photogram to explore the literal and indexical qualities that are popularly assumed between the photograph and the world. Her works play with photography’s conventions to produce images that are recognisable as photographic but which make the processes of their creation and the origins of their subject matter mysterious. In this way simple assumptions of objectivity, reality and literal depiction are rendered complex.
The objects used in her photograms provide a pivot for issues of commodification, signage and fabrication. Transparent Japanese tissue packets, and other objects moulded and cast in resin such as antique cameras and columns of book spines, are exposed directly onto photographic paper. This slow work results in colour saturated images emphasising the nature of photography as a medium of light and time. Davis’ smaller, ‘traditional’ photographs offer glimpses of the transitional in-between spaces of cluttered urban environments, exploring the metamorphoses that occur between nature and culture, between image and text and between the photograph and its source.
I think these photograms are just so beautiful
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