This piece was a real journey from start to finish. In my practice, the process can often be a long, winding road.
The Rain Piece
This piece began with a photograph taken through a rain-covered car window on a surf trip in the Scottish Highlands. I’d just been talking to a longboard surfer when I lifted the camera in the drizzle .
It wasn’t a dramatic moment. Just rain on glass and a little click of my old camera.
I was struck with the clarity of a photo that was taken, even without fully planning it.
I started duplicating the image digitally, flipping it, moving it around.When I mirrored the car window it unexpectedly resembled a surfer viewed from beneath the water’s surface…or so I thought. That felt significant. It became less about documentation and more about perception. The photo had been snapped, sitting inside my camera’s memory card but somehow the meaning and significance of that one photo took a while to percolate.
Instead of using the Apple Pencil, I worked with my fingers directly on the screen to play with the images. Sometimes the physicality of touch is something that is useful to me because I can sense if the image feels ‘right’ in my body as well as visually.
I feathered edges manually. I let edges remain slightly misaligned. I didn’t want it to look like a slick digital exercise. I wanted it to feel like perception itself. A bit blurred. A bit cracked. Slightly unreliable.
At times the image began to resemble fabric. Or cellular structures. Almost as if I was exposing the fabric of reality rather than just an image of rain.
The Plan That Failed
My original plan was technical and ambitious.
I spent weeks sourcing and cleaning an Epson P600 so I could print calibrated digital negatives. I researched Clay Harmon and David Kachel’s photopolymer methods in detail. I attempted curve calibration without access to expensive colour management equipment. I sized thin Hosho paper with gelatine, adhered it to carrier sheets, ironed it flat, prepared encaustic boards from scratch, made my own encaustic gesso, sanded, primed, repeated.
The idea was to print a negative, expose a cyanotype, tone it, and embed it in encaustic.
The printer failed.
Repeatedly.
The negatives were unusable. The image output shifted unpredictably. After weeks of trying to force the system to behave, I had to accept that the technology wasn’t cooperating.
Instead of abandoning the work, I returned to an older device. The Impossible Project Lab. A slightly retro , clunky but hands on reliable piece of technology that allows you to make Polaroids from digital images.
I’d assumed it was obsolete because the app was discontinued. I even tried coding a workaround on my computer. It took me a long time and the app existed for a few weeks before I discovered it didn’t actually require one. I’d over engineered what wanted to be simple. Hands on was the way forward.
So I exposed the images manually. Trial and error by look and by counting the seconds in my head. . Pulling the shutter myself. Simple.
I used expired Impossible film. The chemistry was unpredictable. Bit the way things were going I learned to embrace the process on this project and . The The turquoise that emerged felt like a perfect little light at the end of a long process of active research.
During one exposure a phone notification flashed across the screen. It embedded itself in the image. At first I thought it was a mistake. Then I realised it was an apt record of the whole chaotic process. A little mark of that exact moment the notification landed on my phone. A heart and another one I haven’t been able to decipher on the emulsion lift. It’s trapped in encaustic now. Displayed in a gallery. .
Emulsion with ragged edges. Not even trying to be neat.
I selected two Polaroids and soaked them to lift the emulsion. Using my fingertips, I separated the fragile gelatin layer from its backing and transferred it onto thin japenese Hosho paper.
Once dry, I pressed the Hosho onto a warm encaustic surface. The wax grabbed the emulsion beautifully. When I peeled the paper away, the ragged edges were subtle and alive. Much better than the inkjet tests I had planned.
Earlier attempts to embed printed Hosho had produced soft, fluffy edges that felt unresolved. The Polaroid emulsion created something sharper but still organic. As soon as I lay it on the warm encaustic surface I could feel it being grabbed by the beeswax surface.
Around this time I had also been photographing the dirty windows of my caravan studio. Snail trails. Dust. Cobwebs. Dead flies. I became obsessed with surface.
I started thinking about photogravure screens. About stochastic screens to give printing plates a microscopic dot texture so they can hold etching ink . About how the viewer might not know whether they’re looking at wax, rain, chemical residue, or something living that actually crawled there, leaving its mark.
This work is less about representing rain and more about negotiating with materials.
Reflections on letting tacit knowledge lead the way
Reflecting on the entire process of making this piece I see that the failure of the digital workflow plans was actually a necessary, important step. I was forced to move away from a pre planned agenda and embrace embodied tacit knowledge. I had to rely on this knowledge that Polanyi described.. to use it to make judgments, decisions and feel my way through to the completion of the final piece.
Although I’d spent much time studying tonal software and Clay Harmon’s instructions laid out in his book, the knowledge that really served me in this final stage of making was my previous experiments in encaustic, Polaroid emulsion lifts, using the Impossible Lab by eye. This bank of tacit knowledge was already there for me to use. I’d physically repeated these processes so many times previously that there was a muscle memory of skills I could draw from.
As the process of making flowed, I embraced little physical traces of this hands on process and allowed them to be there in the final encaustic work. A phone notification recorded on the Polaroid surface was a snapshot of the making process itself, completely and honestly embedded in the final work.