Ho Tam Press Gallery

Sunday, November 1. The Artist Studio: Disappearances and reappearances, is one of three ‘open studio’ events that Trudi Lynn Smith and I staged in order to invite dialogue around a project that we had been working on involving photography and the studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

I was reading W.G. Sebald’s, The Rings of Saturn, and came across a passage where he speaks of two Persian friars who had brought the first eggs of the silkworm from China.

Curly willow or tortured willow, corkscrew willow, Salix matsudana ‘Tortusa’Dianthus caryophyllus, carnation Equisetum, (; horsetail, snake grass, puzzlegrass) Laurus nobilis of the family Lauraceae, laurel Aucuba japonica Aucuba japonica Japanese…

They haunted me for years before I could finally place them… small, darkly coloured, murky photographs of the night sky.

“…contrary to the opinion of previous scholarship, the second half of Rosso’s career was dedicated to the achievement of his artistic goals through the creative medium of photography.” Francesco Bacci

Part of my attraction to the work is that it could not survive, and now only exists in relatively few murky black and white photographs that I peer into in an attempt to reconstruct it in my mind.