Walead Beshty is a London- born artist, writer and professor. While on a trip to the Barbican I had the opportunity to visit a solo exhibit featuring over 12,000 of his cyanotype prints created within the space of a year (over 30 a day). He was able to use a range of surfaces such as large pieces of cardboard by coating the surface with UV-sensitive cyanotype chemistry before overlaying an object and exposing it to light. Since the cyanotypes are presented in a chronological timeline the exhibition can be used to show the evolution in his ideas.
I admired that Beshty displayed all his failures as well as successes in this exhibition as he believed all of it was important in order to show transparency. He also created cyanotypes out of things such as bank statements and receipts. My favourite pictures are below, I chose these specific ones out of the large array of images as I liked the amount of detail in the final images, or the thought process behind them. If I had the chance to recreate my cyanotypes I would experiment with different materials to produce an image like the water bottle below, I would also want to create a series of images showing how the cyanotype result changes depending on how much water is in the bottle. |
"Every piece of paper,note, or object that has passed through this studio over the past year is present and those items both constitute the work and narrate how the work was made" |