Seeing Dark Things : Chemical Photography/Images from the darkroom.
Re-entering / 2026 — The darkroom now feels close to the kiln: both are chambers of withdrawal in which encounters disappear from immediate view and return materially transformed.
Or, more tentatively:
Perhaps the darkroom was already a chamber of correspondence. Darkness did not conceal the image; it allowed another form of appearance.
I particularly like the second because it doesn’t force the old photography work to become a precursor to ceramics. It simply opens a correspondence that wasn’t necessarily visible then.
Concept of a ‘Filtow’
A filtered radiance emanating from a vessel not an object interrupting a beam of light.
Seeing Dark Things.
Roy Sorensen.
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The thing contained is not the thing contained.
The spherical intersection space was also crafted in curved thin wood layers.
Steven Holl.
The Representation of Deep Time.
The Mutability of Colour Relationships.
Unleashed Colour World.
Manifestations of Unhindered Radiance.
Albers, yellow square.
Monrian, square of yellow in its field of white.
For both Mondrian and Winifred Nicholson, colour concentrates light and transforms the world.
Flowers were sparks of light.
I used flowers as chalices of light to make my own pictures.
My Cibachrome darkroom has been as much a domestic space as the Alber’s basement and Winifred Nicholson’s farmhouse kitchen. They are places where ideas about the emotional range of a yellow square can exist as naturally as reflections and shadows cast by the sun and moon.
In this new colour world of mine, the circle became nature, and the square became thought.
The circle and square together embody what I think of as human nature.
Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.
Generating an Aura.
Fusing and Pulsating Pigment.
Raveningham.
Site Cyanotypes/Drawings/Intermediaries
Spatial Collages Reconfigured.
spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,
Source: Seeing Dark Things : Chemical Photography/Images from the darkroom.
Archival / Anarchival note
Archival:
This belongs clearly within Drawing / Image. The post sits within your long-running photographic practice, but importantly it is not simply a documentation of photography. The darkroom is treated as a spatial and material condition in which darkness, light, exposure, chemistry and image-making become entangled. The existing archive places it within photography, and the migration sheet already identifies it as a strong candidate for Drawing / Image.
What makes it especially useful in the migration is its proximity to the later ceramic vocabulary. The darkroom and the ceramic kiln have an unexpected correspondence: both are spaces in which something enters a condition of partial withdrawal and emerges transformed.
Anarchival:
I think this is one of the posts where we should avoid simply adding “ceramics” to the tags. Its importance is more subtle.
The darkroom gives you an earlier material logic for thinking about:
light → exposure → withdrawal → transformation → emergence
That has become increasingly important in the ceramic work, where the kiln similarly takes the material away from direct perception. What emerges cannot simply be understood as a transparent record of what went into it.
So there is a useful correspondence:
darkroom ~ kiln
exposure ~ firing
chemical transformation ~ material transformation
image ~ ceramic surface
negative/absence ~ interior/withdrawal
This connects strongly with your present idea of productive forgetting: an encounter enters a material process, becomes partially unavailable, and returns altered rather than preserved intact. That is exactly how your newer Material Reciprocity text describes the movement of gathered encounters through clay and ceramic.
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