29/5/25: PHO730 Topic 1 Activity - Teaser trailer for my Sustainable Strategies project work.
18/5/25: PHO730 Bridging project - Mini book for start of Sustainable Strategies module.
The title of this book comes from the poem 'Mercy' by Martha Sprackland, which speaks of the ease with which we take the lives of insects. The pages are reconstructed from a gardening book from the 1980. Every page that I have reused contains detailed advice on how to kill the invertebrates and plants we view as enemies in our modern gardens. The book is a series of experiments with a variety of photographies: cyanotypes; polaroids; anthotypes and digital photographs forom my own archive. Many of the experiments have not worked, but a few have. They all represent my attempts to visualise the vulnerability and fragility of the natural world as persist in waging war upon it. All of the components in this books are recycled or upcycled; images and artifacts that were created during the course of my explorations of photographies. The only newly-created works are the cyanotypes exposed directly onto the pages. The book can be seen as a companion piece to the project work I am developing in my MA. It takes inspiration from the experimental 'out-takes' of William Henry Fox Talbot who, in th words of Geoffrey Batchen, 'to make good photographs, he first had to take imaginative risks, try new things and produce a good number of informative failures...physical artifacts of interest in their own right.'