Surface Tensions: The Melting Image

Surface Tensions: Gestures on the Photographic Image

This three-part workshop series explores the fertile space where photography meets painting and mark-making. Through hands-on sessions led by three different artists, participants will experiment with diverse approaches to altering photographic images through gesture, texture, and transformation.

Each session introduces a unique method of working across mediums; from painting directly onto photographic prints, to drawing with light on light-sensitive materials, to using chemistry to paint on negatives. Participants will engage with image-making as a layered, tactile process, expanding their understanding of photography beyond the frame and into the realm of physical intervention, encouraging experimentation and cross-disciplinary play.

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Workshop Description:

The Melting Image: Painting on Film

This workshop introduces participants to a variety of methods for painting and mark-making on film. Working across colour, black-and-white and digital negatives, participants will experiment with bleach, inks, different types of resists and alcohol solutions to dissolve, distort and embellish negatives. The work will then be taken into the darkroom, making contact prints from digital negatives and experimenting with chemigram techniques on the exposed prints. Colour negatives will be scanned to explore how the altered colour spectrum translates from negative to positive.

Found negatives will be provided, but participants are welcome to bring their own. The workshop offers insights into how mark-making techniques can be layered visually on different film and paper substrates, uncovering ways to reinvent old images and create new, surreal worlds.

Bio: Ella Morton (she/her) is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker living in Tkarón:to/Toronto, on the land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenoshaunee and the Wendat peoples. Her expedition-based practice has brought her to residencies and projects across Canada, Scandinavia, Latin America, Greenland and Antarctica. Working primarily with lens-based media, she uses experimental analogue processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes. Reflecting on how the medium of photography is changing in the digital age, she aims to uncover how photographs can show more than a straightforward depiction of reality, and how the alchemy of analogue techniques can be reinvented in the present day to tell deeper stories within images.

Image Credit: The Great Kind Mystery, Bleach and ink on 16mm colour film, 2022.

Host or Publisher Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography