Kingston Masters Cyanotype Designate

This year I ran a new Postgraduate “Designate” in cyanotype printing for masters students in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at Kingston School of Art.

These Designates introduce students to tutors’ practice-based research. Using the excellent specialist workshop facilities at the Kingston School of Art, the designates provide students with a range of transdisciplinary techniques to extend and enrich their existing disciplinary practice. Students and tutors work collegiately for the duration of each designate, sharing their developing work, discussing how it explores and expresses ideas emerging through their design studio work, and their continuing research practices. At the conclusion of the designates, students and tutors collectively exhibit their final pieces, sharing this work with the wider creative community of their respective courses, department, school, and faculty. 

For the Cyanotype designate, I produced a series of A4 prints using solid acrylic blocks, exploring the architectural forms suggested by the shadows cast by various arrangements of these blocks.

Light Blocks (2019)

A collection of solid acrylic blocks is reconfigured into twelve arrangements, each suggesting an architectural or urban form. The cyanotype prints made from the shadows, reflections, and refractions of these configurations follow the axonometric projection drawing convention – a true plan is formed from the contact of the blocks on the paper, and the parallel sun rays trace the oblique side elevations. The shadows’ penumbras increase as they pull away from the picture place, blurring what were once sharp edges. As light travels through the solid, yet transparent material, it reveals imperfections in the acrylic as they become imprinted in the fine detail of the cyanotype.