Art Muse-ings: Photography and Spiritualism

BV: Her story sounds incredible – an individual who showed so much strength and resilience despite the hardship she must have faced continually. Your background is originally in filmmaking, but through your installation at Copeland Gallery we really began to see myriad layers, ideas and textures come together in your work. Can you speak a little more about the processes you have developed and explain why they were important in response to your research?

GT: It is incredibly important to me that my practice continues to evolve by exploring and experimenting with new ways of image making. During my postgraduate studies, I discovered and engaged with multiple artistic disciplines as I developed the project. They included plaster casting, silicone mould making, intaglio printing with photopolymer plates using a printing press, 3D scanning, design, mapping, printing as well as sculptural assemblage and printing on marble. Like chapters in a book, they each played a role in building a narrative of time and space via materiality within the installation format. The outcomes of these experiments were a series of chapters which collectively form Looking for Edmonia (Self-Portrait): the photopolymer print series Conjure; the projection mapping film on 3D prints with sound, Reverie and Slumber; the sculptural assemblages made with white Italian marble fragments and photo acetates in the series Subsume; a self-portrait white Italian marble fragment print, I Dreamt of You Last Night; a self-portrait cast in plaster.

BV: You can really see the boundaries being pushed and pulled with each chapter you have made. What draws you to expanded photographic mediums?

GT: I am interested in possibilities, in playing with and creating new layered narratives; fusing and disrupting traditional and emerging media to extend the boundaries of physical and digital spaces. Looking for Edmonia (Self-Portrait) is a way to build on these ideas and further the narrative through varied materiality, traditional and newly discovered [processes that I have come to learn]. This mirrors the storyline connecting a life from the past to my own in the present.

BV: We’ve known one another in your capacity as a wonderful artist educator for many years, but it was only in 2020 that I was introduced to your art practice during a portfolio review at the end of your MA at Westminster University. Your work was included in my write up 10 Artists Whose Practice We Discovered in Portfolio Reviews in 2020. As I have come to learn, storytelling is at the heart of your practice, and you often navigate deeply personal but also more broadly historical archives. Why are you drawn to these methodologies of visual storytelling?

GT: I am drawn to these methodologies of visual storytelling because I am interested in bridging past events, the life force of which time has eroded, with the reality of my internal emotional travel. These ways of working are a form of ritual which allow for ideas to flow while investigating concepts that inform and eventually develop the language for the story to unfold.

BV: It goes back to the idea of how you use the archive. For me, I am so drawn to ephemera and vernacular materials, because as we move through different life experiences our association with these materials and the way we see and understand them changes. As I look at your work, this same feeling resonates too; I am intrigued to see how you let the material you are working with guide you through the making process, as you unpack and unpick the various facets of not just Lewis’ life but your own cultural affinities. With the sculptural element, why was it important to create this self-portrait as a three-dimensional cast?

GT: I wanted to find a way to transfer an idea into a material form that was tactile and had life-like qualities, and a self-portrait as a 3D cast felt like the obvious place to start. The experience of engaging with Lewis’ own choice of medium (sculpture) became a claustrophobic experience. As the layers of plaster increased and the sound of my own breathing became faint, the sensorial experience of being buried alive was a reminder of my own mortality. The three-dimensional cast became the ‘Mother’ which led to the 3D mapping film Reverie and Slumber, the sculptural assemblages Subsume Illuminations, Subsume Metamorphosis and the marble print I Dreamt of You Last Night.

The idea of using self-portraiture was to embody Lewis’ spirit via my own and convey the strong sense of connection I feel with her, building parallels between the transformative, strong, and sometimes fragile characteristics of marble with the transience of the artist’s life, questioning Lewis’s eventual fate and what will become of mine.

BV: That is really fascinating and must have been a deeply moving experience. Alongside self-portraiture, performance - or performing in the landscape - is an important part of this work, as captured in your series of Polaroids. Were all the Polaroids made in Italy?

GT: Yes. Shooting on Italian terrain was important because of the connection that both Edmonia and I have to it. Italy was the breeding ground for my artistic development as a visual artist. It started when I applied to film school which involved writing an essay on the Italian filmmaker Fellini. I soon became immersed and inspired as I discovered his theatrical dream-like aesthetic, steeped in autobiographical context. I travelled to Italy to study language and arts as part of a college student program in Florence and I eventually settled there for three and half years. The experience profoundly affected the aesthetics of my practice both culturally and artistically and continues to do so to this day.

For many years I had held on to two boxes of Type 55 Polaroids, each containing 20 sheets with an expiry date of 2010. I had long been hoping to find the perfect project in which to use them and was very nervous about peeling them apart and the images evaporating due to air exposure. I thought of a scene in Fellini's film Roma, where a building demolition is hampered by the discovery of frescoes. As the construction workers gaze and marvel the outside air quickly erases all trace of their history. I had forty chances to create a narrative; I took the shots with a 5x4 Linhof camera on a tripod, adding to the playful and serendipitous nature I was eager to utilise in the work. The solitary Italian landscapes became the stage of past and present, where play and ritual induce a spiritual state and create a form of transcendence. The resulting imagery was of random ghostly shapes, ethereal sculptural forms, imperfections, and new compositions from the residue of aged photographic chemicals. The polaroid negatives were later used to make the photopolymer prints and some of the marble prints for the series Conjure. Footage seen in Reverie and Slumber of Via Canova (where Lewis lived and had her studio) and the Borghese Gardens and Gallery were also filmed in Rome, where I re-imagined Lewis’ steps, walking on ancient cobblestone streets and gazing at the art that inspired her work.