I'm delighted to share that I'll be teaching a one-day workshop at the Center for Book Arts in New York this October — Cyanotype to Concertina: Building a Folded Sequence. It's a real privilege to be invited to teach at CBA, an organisation that has been supporting artists making books for over fifty years, and I've been looking forward to this one for a while.
The day begins where so much of my own practice begins: with Anna Atkins and the nineteenth-century history of the cyanotype. We'll make a sequence of prints using prepared papers, plant matter, found objects and transparent materials, exposing with sunlight or UV depending on what the weather in Manhattan decides to offer us. From there, we'll fold that sequence into a concertina book — treating the fold not simply as a way of holding pages together, but as a means of building rhythm, connection and narrative across a series of images.
I'll also be introducing climate-adapted cyanotype, an approach central to my research in which the distilled or deionised water conventionally used to mix the chemistry is replaced, where appropriate, with harvested rainwater, seawater or other site-specific bodies of water. It's a small change with significant implications: the environment stops being merely the subject of the image and becomes physically present within it.
Connected to my ongoing research project The Ecological Wetroom™, we'll be collecting the cyanotype washwater produced during the session rather than letting it disappear down the drain as an invisible waste stream. I'll demonstrate a simple DIY filtration process — not as a finished solution, but as a research and teaching tool, and as a way of opening up a conversation about material responsibility in the darkroom and the wetroom.
No previous experience with cyanotype or bookbinding is needed. If you've never printed or folded anything in your life, you'll be fine — and if you have, there'll be plenty to experiment with.