Jo Stapleton

I arrived at the residency with a ridiculous amount of ‘just in case’ equipment including a variety of cameras, films, chemistry and printing without a darkroom materials. Rather than work on a specific project themes or ideas, I wanted the freedom and opportunity to experiment and creatively respond to what the light and the landscape shared with me.

When I initially read about the residency, I was particularly struck by the studio space and the incredible estuary landscape on the other side of the studio windows. I thought how amazing it would be to transform the studio into a camera obscura and project the outside environment into a room that has hosted and enabled so much
creativity inspired by that landscape.

During my second week at the residency and a dream about making the camera obscura, a day with suitable light and weather conditions arrived. Using tinfoil to create a makeshift blackout, the camera obscura appeared across the back of the studio wall and ceiling– the landscape projected upside down. Standing inside the room as a camera, in the middle of a living breathing photograph – watching the estuary water ripple across the wall, was such a special experience and amazing to be able to show/share it with my co-resident, Katie King and our host Scarlett.

On my first morning I set up tiny pin hole cameras, made from plastic film canisters, placed at intervals along the estuary. In mid-February it felt like a leap of faith to attempt to make solargraphs – using the light from the sun to record its passage across the estuary. I took them down on the last evening at the residency with no idea if anything had been recorded. I was delighted to find a set of mysterious abstract images including strange globes of grey light.

I spent time each day exploring the estuary and local area on foot, capturing images on 35mm film, polaroid and my large format pinhole camera. I was particularly struck by the layers of texture in the landscape and the movement of light. A highlight of the residency was an evening spent at the Dragon Theatre in Barmouth, listening to the local Dragon Storytellers and Ffion Phillips. In their folk tales, they talked about ‘thin spaces’ the transitional places that exist between this world and the next. Thie idea of and interpretation of ‘thin spaces’ particularly resonated with me. In the months leading up to the residency I’ve been working on a book ‘Into the trees’, using time in the darkroom as a meditative tool to creatively remember and reimagine the
sensations of time spent in nature. In the Japanese Art of Forest Bathing, Dr Li Quin (1982) describes a deeper sensory awareness of nature. He states: ‘we know this deep in our bones. It is like an intuition, or an instinct - a feeling that is sometimes hard to describe. In Japanese, we have a word for those feelings that are too deep for words: yugen. Yugen gives us a profound sense of the beauty and mystery of the universe. It is about this world but suggests something beyond it’ . Chatting together with Katie, we felt the studio space itself could be a ‘thin space’ – a place that brought about shifts in our perception – a space of awe and inspiration.

During the residency I began to explore the idea of capturing and creating thin spaces using light – something mentioned by the storytellers of things glimpsed often out of the corner of an eye. Photograms – incorporating found objects and materials into my images, is part of my photographic practice. Capturing the landscape on film,
I wrapped cellophane around my polaroid camera lens to fracture and diffuse the light. Developing my 35mm film by hand at the residency, I experimented with film soup (disrupting the development process and film surface), as a result patches of white light found their way onto my negatives. Sharing the studio space with Katie
and watching her textile practice at work, stray bit of material including fabric interfacing found their way into my film scanner and provided other opportunities to create and explore light. I began to test out ideas and explore images at the residency, using cyanotype printing and toning techniques – packets of matcha tea bought from the coop supermarket in Barmouth produced a beautiful pink/purple tone that seemed to capture the otherness of the landscape.

The residency was such a special time – the freedom to create and reflect away from the routine of daily life was such a gift. I will always remember my time there. Thank you Scarlett, Jake and Toby the cat, for making me so welcome. Thank you also Kaite King – it was such a pleasure to get to know you, have an opportunity to watch
your process and amazing textile creations grow in our studio space.

Back home from the residency I’m excited to creatively remember and revisit Mawddach in my darkroom using the negatives and to further explore the ideas inspired by my stay.

Jo Stapleton
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