Jude Sanders SOA – portfolio

Contact the artist

judesanders[at]gmail.com

Exhibition information

My work is inspired by nature and the emotions it provokes. In my recent work I have been exploring working in partnership with nature and the elements to create experimental cyanotypes. Three works here are wave imprinted cyanotypes, made on a Cornish beach by allowing the waves to wash over the print and then using the elements that come to hand; sand, seaweed, shells, jellyfish  to make the composition.  The other works are collograph prints inspired by the Cornish landscape and featuring Choughs, the native crow.  

 

I am interested in the traces of memory that inhabit spaces, the glimpses of past moments entangled with place and the feelings and thoughts this triggers. For me memory is not purely represented by objects or people but also embodied in places, spaces and in movement. My images aim to fix a moment in time to create a sense of captured emotions.

 

Cyanotype is one of the first photographic processes, invented by Sir John Herschel in 1841 and produces distinctive blue and white images. You might be familiar with the beautiful images of seaweed and other algae at Kew Gardens by Anna Atkins or you may have tried making sun prints at school or in workshops. The process works by exposing paper coated with iron salts to UV light or sunlight, this creates distinctive blue and white images where areas exposed to the sun produce a deep prussian blue and those less exposed to sunlight are paler or even white where not exposed to light. 

 

I find cyanotype a fascinating process, where you have to surrender control and accept the elements as part of the artistic process. The results are unpredictable and the failure rate high, but when it works, beautiful unique images are created, each completely original.

 

Media used: cyanotype, print making, mixed media

 

My artistic inspiration comes from: the photographer Meghann Riepenhoff who makes large scale cyanotypes, Japanese woodblock prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige, the abstract expressionists Joan Mitchell &Gehard Richter.