I went to the exhibition at the V&A and have been inspired since.
I want my next body of work to involve photography more using contact photography and photograms as well as projection work.
Susan Derges produces photograms which are camera-less images, using torches, moonlight and flash to capture aspects of nature directly onto photographic paper describing the connections between ourselves and the natural world fusing art and science.
British born Derges trained as a painter before turning to photography and in particular, to the camera-less photography for which she is best known. In her art, Susan Derges contrives events to describe nature's forms, triggering imaginary, metaphorical lines of thought that link both the organic momentum in her prints and in the viewer to greater, unseen, macrocosmic forces.
In the River Taw series, for example, Derges uses the river near her Devonshire home as a lens, and fragments of ice, trailing ivy and debris reflected or passing through the water becomes the image.
Atlantic Ocean Diptych
1998
unique gelatin silver photogram, two parts
Susan Derges'Eden 5'
2004
Dye destruction print photogram
Height 101.5 cm x width 243.8 cm
Museum no. E.445-2010
© Courtesy of Susan Derges
This work was made as part of a residency at the Eden Project in Cornwall. It concentrates in a single image the many different wave forms that Derges has examined over the years. Like other artists and philosophers, she is exploring the idea that natural patterns are the signs of deeply hidden affinities, visible signs that point to the invisible.
Smoke from the series My Ghosts (1999) by Adam Fuss
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