Lumen Print Workshop with Many Hands Art Centre & Art Gallery New South Wales

In October 2018, I was commissioned to travel to Alice Springs to facilitate lumen print workshops with artists from Iltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) Art Centre; the home of the Namatjira watercolour artists.

This project led to the body of work called Mparra Karrti - Us mob belong to the Country, exhibited in The National 2019 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Working with the AGNSW curators, Isobel Parker Philip and Coby Edgar, the workshops continued a speculative inquiry into Albert Namatjira’s possible relationship to photography. The project involved time spent On Country with the artists, learning some of their stories, the stories of the Arrernte people and Mparn­twe (Alice Springs), and collecting specimens of plants used in bush food and medicine. It also involved converting the stock room of the art centre into a darkroom and making lumen prints - lots of lumen prints.

While the artists had previous experience with the lumen print process, I was able to share my knowledge of the process, different papers, and the various possibilities for layering and manipulating the process to various effects. This sharing of the process was all based on my research and practice in lumen printing, environmental collaboration and reciprocity. The resulting work combines generative images made via direct contact between plant specimens and the photographic paper, and the “Hermannsburg School’ style watercolour.

I had previously described lumen prints as unique material objects that engage the haptic register of chemical photography to slowly reveal an emergent process of collaboration, reciprocity, and becoming. Through the semiotic concept of double indexicality, lumen prints reduce the distance between the artist, the subject and the process… simultaneously point outwards to the physical world, depicted through the photographic trace; and inward to reveal an intimate and affective exchange between the artist, materials and environment. The addition of watercolour only deepens the richness and possibilities of this work. The exhibited work can be viewed here.

Rutjipma (Mt Sonder), Vanessa Inkamala, 2018.