Earthsea (2025)

 This series was triggered by an accident. I corrupted a 120mm film while manually rewinding it in complete darkness onto the out-of-production reel of my “new”, hundred years old, Kodak Vollenda. In the middle of Scottish Highlands with no other camera or a spare film, I pushed away the thought of what, if anything, would come out of it and kept shooting. I didn’t expect much developing the film, but even so my stomach dropped, as I pulled it out of the water. White stripes run in some unexplainable pattern across it, cutting through the rugged landscape and wiping off everything on their way. The negatives looked surreal and… irredeemable. I didn’t have the heart to throw away the results of my “unmaking” and came back to it many months later, after I had time to reflect on the images and my reaction to them.

The series was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea quartet- a chronicle of “undoing” the “unmaking” and restoring the Equilibrium. Each image is named after an isle in the Earthsea archipelago and is a composite of the same negative developed at different exposures. I handprinted the images using solar etching.

Edition of 15 photopolymer gravure prints on Hahnemuhle paper. Paper size approx. 36x29cm (14.2x11.4 inches), image- 21x14.5cm (8.3x5.7 inches).