My studio is in boxes and I don't mean metaphorically. The paper, the inks, the cold wax, the gold leaf, the collagraph plates, the pastels and the brushes and the accumulated evidence of twenty years of making - all of it is stacked in the garage while the studio next door is being rebuilt. I walk past the boxes every day. Even through the cardboard and tape, the comforting smell of an art studio seeps out. Cold wax and turpentine, old paper and size, oil pastels and paint. Sometimes I peel back the tape on one of the boxes and peer inside.
As frustrating as it is, I keep telling myself the waiting is instructive.
What is it about the physical materials that matters so much to me – why I cannot simply shoot and edit and call it done, which is, after all, what most photographers do? The camera is already a sophisticated instrument for making pictures without touching anything. You point, press, adjust settings with your thumb, pull out the card and hand it over to Lightroom. The image arrives on screen and you move sliders until it looks right. The whole process can be conducted in an atmosphere of comfortable hygiene. Clean hands throughout.
That process doesn't seem to be enough somehow. For me, a piece of the puzzle is missing.
Part of it is the paper. Inkjet paper is a fine and wonderful invention - but let's not kid ourselves that it's anything like working with a beautiful handmade paper. A kozo paper with soft deckled edges, long visible fibres and a gently irregular surface perhaps. Or a Fabriano Rosaspina - a softly grained Italian printmaking paper with a generous, tactile surface. Assorted sheets that take ink differently depending on the humidity in the room; substrates that absorb and repel, that have a surface you can feel before you've put a mark on them. Paper that has its own ideas about the best way forward.
Working this way changes the way I think. The hand understands what the eye has yet to realise. Press too hard and the surface breaks. Press too lightly and nothing sticks. The material has its own agenda, and engaging with it needs to be done on its own terms.
This is very different from negotiating with software, where the relationship is essentially command and compliance. The software does what you tell it, and the result may or may not be what you had hoped for. When the material fails, it often fails beautifully. A mark that cracked where you didn't expect, an emboss that took on a life of its own - these are not mistakes to be undone with Control-Z. They are information. Happy accidents to be explored. Sometimes a completely new way forward.
There is also the question of imperfection. Photography has a complicated relationship with it. The camera records what was in front of it, and even heavily processed images carry the ghost of the original scene. Physical materials introduce a different kind of uncertainty - one that cannot be resolved by adjusting a slider. A mark made in cold wax is the mark that happened, not necessarily the mark that was intended. You can work over it, but you cannot pretend it didn't occur.
Working with physical materials slows you down, and in a different way to slowness on screen. On screen, slowness is something you have to impose against the grain of a medium built for speed. In the studio it's a given. It comes free with the materials. Drying. Mixing. Muttering and pottering. That's where the thinking happens.
For now the boxes stay taped. I have been drawing instead - pen, paper, and Rebelle. Nothing precious - small marks while I watch the light on the water, trying to get a gesture that conveys something of what I see. The line refuses to play along. But the failure at least has texture to it, in the way that a deleted .jpg never will.
