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March 9, 2024 — April 6, 2024
Hydrangea — Diana Bloomfield
A dual exhibition featuring the 2023 (S)Light of Hand Award winners Debra Achen and Diana Bloomfield. Debra Achen's "Folding and Mending" series explores themes of environmental change and memory through layered photographic prints, while Diana Bloomfield presents her exquisite botanical images created using historic photographic processes alongside her handcrafted artist books.
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Debra Achen was born and raised near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she developed a passion for art and a connection to nature as a young child. She majored in Art Education at Edinboro State University before completing her BA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to training in traditional film and darkroom photography, she studied a variety of studio arts, including drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture.
After college, Achen embarked on a career in film and television production, and later in educational technology. All the while, she enjoyed taking travel and nature photos as a creative outlet. The gift of a digital camera rekindled her love of photography as a fine art medium. This coincided with a move to the Monterey Peninsula, an incredibly scenic area steeped in the history of photography. Achen immersed herself in this environment and continues to attend workshops and lectures to engage with new technical and creative innovations in the field.
Achen's photographs have been featured in juried exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, and in curated exhibitions at the Weston Gallery, the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel Visual Arts Gallery, and Upstart Modern in Sausalito. Her "Folding and Mending" series was selected for the 2022 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50, and her award-winning self-published book, Frequency Shift: The Stonehenge Continuum, was featured in the 12th Annual Photobook Show at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Her work can be found in a number of private and corporate collections.
Folding and Mending
The hand-folded, burned, and stitched prints in my "Folding and Mending" series are a way of conveying "the world folding in on itself" from the impacts of climate change. We are so focused on our daily tasks and routines that we are neglecting the environment on which our very survival depends. We have created an imbalance in which our world is collapsing.
As record storms and wildfires wreak havoc on our forests and communities, our ecosystems are unraveling at an alarming rate. My hand-manipulated photographs allude to the results. Coastlines erode and submerge as sea levels rise. Trees and forests, stressed from years of drought, succumb to disease and fire. Golden hills crack and crumble. All at the hand of mankind.
While large, complex solutions are needed to fix the damage, there are small things each of us can do to help slow the erosion, clear the air, mend the cracks, and hold our planet together. The stitching in my images is a metaphor for the mending and rebuilding we must do to make our world whole again.
Nature is resilient, and our impacts can be reversed. Do we have the resolve to make change happen? Some of the "Folding and Mending" pieces are more deconstructive in nature. Multiple prints are collaged in layers, torn and scorched on the edges. Bits and patches extend beyond the image border, some held in place by threads—as if we dangle at the precipice.
Diana Bloomfield is a fine art photographer with over 40 years of experience specializing in 19th century photographic printing techniques, including cyanotype, platinum/palladium, and her process of choice—gum bichromate—loved for its intuitive, interpretive, and endlessly creative qualities.
Widely exhibited and published, Diana has received numerous awards including a New Jersey State Visual Arts Fellowship, multiple Regional Artist Grants, and a 2023 Artist Support Grant from the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. She was named a Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist in 2014, 2018, 2019, and 2022, and received Rfotofolio's 2021 Denis Roussel Award.
Her images and handmade artist books are exhibited internationally and featured in numerous publications, including Christina Z. Anderson's Gum Printing, Christopher James' The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, and Alternative Process Photography for the Contemporary Photographer. Her work is held in public collections including the Norton Museum of Art and North Carolina State University's Gregg Museum of Art & Design.
A native North Carolinian, Diana lives and works in Raleigh, where she received her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from NC State University. She teaches photographic printing techniques throughout the U.S. and internationally, and is represented by The Cardinal Gallery (Toronto) and photo-eye Gallery (Santa Fe).
**For me, photographs are all about the past. Even when I photograph to make a statement about the present, or to comment on the future, the image itself—the one I've just made simply by opening and closing a shutter—is cemented in the past. When I look at photographs, no matter whose photographs they are, or when they were made, they inevitably conjure all sorts of memories. Looking at old photographs of my family, or even of myself, I am staring at tangible memories, often barely recognizing those people in the pictures looking back at me. And late at night, when I replay events that occurred earlier in my day, those events or conversations appear in my mind as a series of visual narratives, not all that clear or well-defined, and very much like half-remembered dreams.
To help me create images that echo those visual vignettes, I often use pinhole or toy cameras. Unusual perspectives, long exposures, and a sense of movement and fluidity are inherent with these particular cameras. I also print in 19th-century hand-applied printing processes, an intuitive way to print, offering both creative freedom and infinite possibilities. These printing processes mesh well with my images, which are nearly always interpretive. The repeated layerings of the gum bichromate process, in particular, remove all the hard and clearly defined edges, resulting in a softness and ambiguity—much the way we see and remember.
And so, for me, the photographic print itself provides a tangible way to hold on to the past—to a memory or dream—however elusive, fugitive, and ever-shifting.
I began this ongoing series six years ago, on March 3rd, 2018 (Day #29), as part of my mission to create a piece of handmade art every day for a year. The Old Garden honors my own Southern garden, which I view clearly from my back windows, and that of my grandmother's, now seen only in my mind's eye. Etched in deep faded hues, our gardens mingle, intertwine, and overlap. Most of these flowers, now permanently fixed as pigment encased in hardened gum arabic, remain—like my memories—as ephemeral as ever.
These images are of my daughter, Annalee, who is now 36. I began this series nearly 25 years ago. This ongoing project has always been and remains a collaborative one. As metaphorical portraits, they suggest the essence of a person, rather than offer any literal interpretation. I like to think of these as visual vignettes that suggest half-remembered, fragmented dream worlds. They borrow from the past, my ever-changing and skewed memories of that past, and fleeting moments in time.
