Ho Tam Press Gallery
Installation in progress.
![](https://lyndagammon.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/3.jpg)
Installation in progress.
Over the past week I encountered two works that caught my attention. One was during a critique session at UVic when Nic Vandergugten presented a video installation of Tree Climb the other was over a coffee with Trudi Lynn Smith as we talked about her ongoing project Trouble With Trematodes.
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.
They haunted me for years before I could finally place them… small, darkly coloured, murky photographs of the night sky.
Scanning through the Ikebana section of the university library I came upon this book: Rikka: The Soul of Japanese Flower Arrangement by Fugiwara Yuchiku The book speaks of the origins…
It was an amazing process involving a strange gelatinous concoction of silver nitrate and other chemicals heated in a crock pot in the darkroom to be later cooled and then squeezed through a kitchen ‘ricer’ and then reheated. The liquid was then carefully poured onto the surface of a very clean pieces of glass put into the back of the 4″ X5 camera and exposed.
Despite our strategies to bridge the visual gap between the photograph and the thing being photographed, that distance stubbornly remains…