Every year in June we team up with Lutyens wine bar and bistro to commission an Eyestorm artist to create work with an association with wine to hang in their Fleet Street premises. Cameraless photography artist Jo Bradford has made photograms by shining light through wine in the darkroom.
We began working with Devon-based artist
Jo Bradford towards the end of last year when we came across her work and invited her to make limited editions for Eyestorm. The result was her dynamic
Autogenesis series, which we launched first at Battersea AAF in London, and then in New York a few weeks later. The work was received extremely well at both fairs, with many full series’ as well as individual pieces selling, and the prints have continued to sell steadily online since.
Following the success of ‘Autogenesis’, when we started discussing who should be this year’s ‘Lutyens artist’, it seemed obvious that Jo should be considered, and after presenting her work to Peter Prescott - who, along with Sir Terrance Conran owns Lutyens, as well as a handful of other eateries in the capital - it was decided that Jo would be the one to make work for this year’s project.
Jo Bradford is the fourth artist to make wine-related limited edition prints for our ongoing collaboration with Lutyens, and has created three new works, which are now on show at the venue alongside additional work by the artist, which includes the ‘Autogenesis’ series.
Jo creates her photographic works in the darkroom by shining light directly onto light sensitive paper without the use of a camera, which is often referred to as ‘cameraless photography’ or ‘painting with light’. The three compositions she’s made for the 2016 Lutyens editions:
Elements with Syrah,
Elements with Malbec and
Elements with Provence Rose, are photograms produced by exposing light through glassware filled with wine from Prescott & Conran’s Albion range. In addition to this, the orb-like circular structures and geometric forms - which are created by using Perspex rods - echo the modernist, art deco style architecture of the Lutyens building in Fleet Street, which was designed by British Architect Edwin Lutyens in the 1930’s.
The process of how Jo works to make her unique creations is fascinating. Working in this way with colour and light uses the additive colour system, where white light is the combination of all colours of the spectrum, which means exposing light through a coloured filter will produce the opposite colour on the colour wheel. So where red and rosé wine have been used in these works, hues of green and cyan are generated. Making images of this nature requires patience and perseverance; with exposure times ranging from 10 to 60 minutes in order to generate the required depth of colour as the light penetrates through the liquid filters, it meant that Jo had to spend long periods in the pitch black blind space of her photographic darkroom. After much experimentation, Jo learned that the dense deep red tints of the Syrah and Malbec wines necessitated long exposures to allow light to penetrate through the liquid resulting in wonderful depth of colour and tonal range. The blush pink of the Provence Rosé, however, transmitted the light more rapidly, producing sumptuous colours and patterns. The black expanse occurs in areas where there was no filtration of the light at all; here the tremendous length of the exposures caused the light to burn out completely resulting in the deep black that forms the beautiful dense backdrop of each image.
There’s a unique luminosity in these works, which glow with a neon, back-lit appearance. This is achieved because the transparent emulsion layer when painting with light allows the white base to remain visible and bright, making the work glow just like the light that was used in its creation.
The three new works
Elements with Syrah,
Elements with Malbec and
Elements with Provence Rose will be launched this evening at a private view event at Lutyens, and then will be available to view from Thursday 9th June onwards. View the work in more detail, along with other work by Jo Bradford,
here.