’My obsession was not finishing last’
Two months ago I was in San Sebastián, on the northern Spanish coast. I went there to visit Chillida Leku, Eduardo Chillida’s studio and sculpture park, and to stand in front of ‘Comb of the Wind’, his three iron sculptures fixed to the Atlantic sea-cliffs. While I was there, I went to the Museum of…
’undulating piles of lead-coloured rubble’
I’ve been working on images with long horizontal lines of small visual incidents packed closely together. The idea came, I think, from a trip to Japan a year ago, where I travelled on the bullet trains from, amongst other places, Hiroshima to Kyoto. The trains are so fast that the landscape/cityscape seems to speed past…
’one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog’
’-the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavier rollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, and at last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forked or zigzag, but rippled rivulets-’. That’s John Ruskin, from his talk ‘The Storm-Cloud of the…
’White, great eviscerator’
’Inside now. The word is white. It covers my tongue like paint—- I say it and light forms, Bottles arise, emptiness opens its corridors Into the entrances and endless things that form bears. White, great eviscerator.’ From ‘Still life with stick and word’ by Charles Wright (I’ve used a quote from him before, with one…
’With boots poulticed in noxious slop’
A collage made from photograms using roughened and rounded glass fragments collected from the mud and shingle of the Thames foreshore at Limehouse. I don’t know their age, they look perfectly ordinary to me, no lettering. The circles must be the bottoms of glass bottles. Nothing valuable, nothing like the treasures described in Ted Sandling’s…
’A Source of Marvellous Accidents’
One of the interesting frustrations of the way I make photograms is that I can’t see what I’m doing. This image was made by repeatedly moving a handful of materials across the photographic paper, exposing with a low-angled torch. At the end of which I had, as always, a blank, a white rectangle. I’m reliant…
’To let them decay – to break down and reveal themselves’
The squares that make up this image must be part of photograms I created about 30 years ago. At that time I had rudimentary equipment, and I used to wash my prints in the bath. It doesn’t do a very good job at getting rid of the chemicals, and over a long period of time…
’You pursue your own eccentric designs..’
With old photograms and collages, when I finally decide they just don’t work, I cut them up into squares and play around with combinations. Which means that details created at quite different times, maybe years apart, can end up next to each other, as if that’s where they were meant to be all along. A…
‘I have been an amateur of light for years’
The title is a quote from John Burnside in his 2002 poem ‘The Light Trap’, from his collection of the same name. He wasn’t writing about photograms; his poem is about catching and counting moths, starting when he was a boy, rigging up ‘a sail of light amidst the apple trees’. But his lines feel…
‘Lettering rapidly rubbed out before I can read’
From the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow’s ‘Canto of Signs without Wonders’ ‘I look where I’m going, it’s the way yesterday’s and the day before’s clouds depict themselves over and over an affluently planted skyline: the clouds lay the whiteness on thick over the bluenesses. The impasto is unsigned, there’s a kind of an impression…
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Dave Eva Photograms 