DP COLLECTIVE

https://dpcollective.co.uk

DP Collective is a collaborative project exploring traditional analogue photography techniques. Arising during the strange times of lockdown and access to a mummified dog, a batch of large format infra-red film and a darkroom.

The overarching aim of the DP collaboration is to create a series of images/shrines depicting various real and imagined deities, goddesses and gods incorporating traditional analogue techniques.

Currently interests lay in exploring pattern and repetition, bringing together man made mass produced objects combined with unique natural elements.

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Visions at the frothy edge, we exist in a sea of consciousness swimming with the manifest, unmanifest and everything in between. The high weirdness at the cosmic scale and the quantum. The middle realm is relegated to a shape caught out of the corner of one’s eye, as the dusk settles or the dawn lights the night’s edge.

What happens when psycho drifting through the everyday? The high weirdness of the middle realm of the everyday. The realm of the solid objects and a steady tick of the mantel clock, starts to flicker and whisper. Can you see with your ears and hear with your eyes?

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ANUBIS

Silver gelatin – Large format contact print

Anubis became the first deity to be portrayed due to the desiccated remains of a dog coming into our possession after being found in a friends garden shed. Daisy, as she became known, looked mummified and open to links with dog gods and with Anubis, the Egyptian jackal headed guide to the underworld.

Anubis would weigh the hearts of souls as they passed to the underworld against the goddess of justice Matt’s feather of truth. If the hearts weighed more than the feather of truth then Ammit, the crocodile headed goddess and “swallower of the dead” would eat up the heart and the soul would cease to exist and never make it to the afterworld.

Using a behemoth commercial copy camera in the darkroom to play with scale, combined with obsolete infrared film that was originally intended to print 2-tone text such as menus in industrial print machines. These large rolls of film (30m x 30cm format) languished for years in the garden shed of a retired commercial printer. Even though the film was obsolete it offered the luxurious possibility of ultra large format negatives. Contact printing at this scale allows for incredible detail.

Combining, layering and collaging imagery. The final composite image is produced with numerous layered masks. Each large mask has multiple negatives attached and those are exposed or masked depending on how the masks are layered on top of each other. This allows for each element of the piece to be exposed to the correct density and layered on top or beneath other elements.

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KALEIDOSCOPE OF BUTTERFLIES

Kaleidoscope of Butterflies references that each of the tableauxs of offerings to Anubis has a butterfly included. The butterfly is often used as a metaphor for transformation and we see it here as the soul transforms on its journey to the afterworld.

In Kaleidoscope of Butterflies we explore iconography with 3 dimensional objects arranged under the copy camera. The tableauxs were captured on large format colour paper negatives, infra-red film, digitaly altered and also reshot onto glass with wet plate collodion.

Kaleidoscope of Butterflies 1

Large format colour paper negatives.

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Kaleidoscope of Butterflies 2

Wet Plate Collodion on glass

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Kaleidoscope of Butterflies 3

Digitaly inverted from scan of paper neg

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Kaleidoscope of Butterflies 4

Large format infra-red negatives

The qualities of the infra red film with its ability to capture light the human eye can’t see and its high density of silver content, produces otherworldly luminously dark imagery. A choice was made to present the negatives themselves as captivating images in their own right, that reflect light back to the viewer.

When shown each image had a torch and a magnifying glass attached to encourage the viewer to investigate the play of light and the detail large format film can capture.

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Sacred Heart

Silver gelatin – Large format contact print

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Group Show – POROUS LIGHT

‘Porous Light’ was a contemporary fine art photography exhibition at the Espacio Gallery @espaciogallery near Shoreditch High Street, East London, and brought together 19 artists working across alternative process analogue photography. The show, was curated by @wendyihardieartist ,

The title was been chosen by Hardie to reflect alt process photography’s aesthetic and technical ability to seep into and merge with different and diverse disciplines, in visceral, abstract, complex layered ways.

DP Collective showed the work included in POROUS LIGHT in honour of Martin Smith (27/03/1944 – 23/10/2203) who generously helped and supported us on our journey to make the images presented here.

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Alter to Daisy

Colour paper negatives/wood/mixed media

It seemed natural to honour “Daisy”, as we fondly named our stand in for Anubis, in the form of an alter. This started a series of alters/shrines dedicated to old and imagined entities/goddesses and gods.

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DAISY’S CREMATION

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Group Show – LIGHT BEGUILE

Light Beguile, an exhibition of Experimental and idiosyncratic hand made work that uses modern, traditional and downright eccentric methods of capturing light and nailing it to things.

Silver gelatin – Large format contact print

Large format infra-red negatives

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RELEASE / WISH / REMEMBER

Celebrating the external flux that we all inhabit and marking seasonal change at a time when the frilly edge of reality is a little bit more frothy and liminal. We are reminded that we are part of nature.

We invite those present to participate in ritual.

We can RELEASE those elements in our lives that hold us in inertia.

We can WISH for our intentions to manifest.

We can REMEMBER and give thanks for influences in our lives.

Instructions

Take a baggage label.

Choose something in your life that you want to RELEASE, WISH or REMEMBER.

Write it on the baggage label.

Post it into the heart of the figure.

(The figure will be burned in the evening)