Struck By Light

Poster Exhibition Featuring Ellen Carey with Nettie Edwards 

In an open call, Ellen Carey asked ‘What is a 21^st century photograph?’ … and … ‘What does a 21^st century photograph look like?’  Ellen’s answer is seen through her Zerograms.  The winner of the call was Nettie Edwards with her series Grave Goods.

We begin our celebration of the Kensington and Chelsea Art Week with an exhibition that brings the two artists together.

Struck by Light references Ellen’s zerograms made without a camera.  In colour printing, the paper is extremely light sensitive, and by allowing light to fall on the “dings” – seen as errors in traditional printing – Ellen creates the “shadows”. Her work intentionally upends traditional methods resulting in distinctive, abstract arrays of colour.

Grave Goods is part of an ongoing personal exploration and reflection, working with the belongings of the artist’s deceased aunt, through the medium of unstable, organic, photo-sensitive processes – anthotype and chlorophyll printing.

Ellen Carey (b.1952 USA) is an educator, independent scholar, guest curator, photographer and lens-based artist, whose unique experimental work (1974-2020) spans several decades.   What is often viewed and explored as a medium of direct representation, in Ellen’s hands becomes a form that looks in on and becomes of itself.  Her art doesn’t seek to be a snapshot of a subject or the world, but reflects the beauty of the process itself, whether that be Polaroid or photogram. And so, the work, rootless and free from reference or material context, allows components of the photographic image – notably light and colour – to take centre stage, in a practice that acknowledges the science in creativity.

A forager, scavenger and detective, Nettie Edwards works with vintage, plastic or homemade analogue cameras, together with free lensing techniques and camera-less photography. Site specific installation, found narratives and speculative fiction are components of her practice, referencing her background as a theatrical designer (1981 – 2017).   Since 2014, she has been researching the anthotype process (plant-based printing) growing the plants she make prints with in her garden and two allotments in the English Cotswolds.

Poet and writer, Donna Fleischer, has worked with Ellen for many years, writing essays and catalogue texts to accompany Ellen’s images.  The words displayed here are from Rapture in Oneiric Blue – an essay written for Ellen’s Dings & Shadows Series (2018).