3 story brick building with recessed balconies, rooms measuring eight foot square and 6 foot high, interior passageways, courtyards, tunnels, wallpaper, forbidden, sidewalks covered with planks, rose and mustard coloured walls, temple and shrine, cold, school, brown wainscoting, two rooms separated by adjoining closets, furtive, develop, stop, fix, double tired verandah that projects out over the sidewalk, wooden columns, doors on the second and third floors opening onto balconies, 10 second exposure, fiber based mural paper, exposed metallic salts 10 seconds, shadows, 562 fisgard street.

In the darkroom, I cut long sheets of fiber-based paper from a roll and pin the unwieldy and awkwardly cut pieces to the wall. I build cardboard and balsa wood models of ‘tunnels’ and ‘verandahs’ and now hold them against the surface. Switching the light on and off again I expose the photographic paper.

In the darkness I roll the paper through the Developer. Slowly it softens. I transport the paper, floppy and dripping, to the Stop and Fix bath and then wash it in the large stainless steel sink. Shiny metallic salts have responded to the light by oxidizing and turning black while the unexposed areas covered by the ‘tunnels’ and ‘verandahs’ remain white. Later these black, grey and white ‘photograms’ are hung to dry and the rich, pearly, velvety, receptive surfaces curl and warp. I repeat this process a number of times until I have a large stack of photographs.

Back in the studio I cut into the shadowy shapes and fold the paper. The shards fall to the floor in a large heap. They are picked up and pinned to the wall with pieces of wood. Draped over the long sticks, layer upon layer expanding inverting and transforming, they slowly build into remembered shadows and recollected stories of this studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

Photograms printed on fiber based photo mural paper, wood sticks and cardboard models painted with india ink and white paint.
As installed each piece approx: 12 – 13′ high X 4′ wide X 2′ deep.