'All that Glitters' Steph Shipley
Polaroid photographs are a physical remnant of a moment in time. This project manipulates the structure of the photograph itself, dissecting the layers, re-homing the watery, image-laden skins back onto the walls, into their places of origin.
Steph writes:
Steph Shipley
All that Glitters
Unus Multorum 2020, Plas Bodfa, Anglesey
On first acquaintance, the dusty shadows cast by the play of winter light that swathed the interior of Plas Bodfa beguiled the senses, enticing a response replete with indeterminate possibilities. The fragments of what remained as human and architectural palimpsest spoke of the gaps and interventions imposed on the house over the century, and the collective remnants of a public and private interior that pervaded its decline and forthcoming revival.
These elements came to rest within the folds of failed emulsion; a mechanical disturbance evident in the series of Polaroid photographs I took during my visit late in November 2019. The images gathered from a space between times with their twilight palette and scarred edges, were indexical of a faded past; the personal and universal sensibilities of memory, time and place, and the process of becoming.
The innate possibilities that lie within the images I collect are often transformed through other means. Traces of Polaroid origin are re-stated through the intaglio print process to reflect and disturb their outcomes, evocative of Plas Bodfa as a site of heterotopia and my embodied encounter with its present and missing spaces.
The ruptured fabric of the house caused by the reductive and additive processes that have defined the multiple layers of its character and temporal narrative, also prompts a further transformation. Lifting the emulsion from a selection of the Polaroid photographs, the delicate manipulation of the watery, image-laden skins and the unpredictable aftermath of their re-homing on other substrates implies a parallel alteration the house is yet to endure.
Constraints of access to the physical sites and spaces I research have long been part of my practice; the process of waiting embedded in the temporal narrative and performance of place. As the Unus Multorum 2020 community of artists we are grateful to Julie Upmeyer and her family for the gift of the evolving project as it expands into the digital realm with possibilities far beyond its original intent. The Polaroid photographs, solar plate etchings and emulsion lifts on panel, and the melancholy wall that beckons them home to Plas Bodfa, will become its history in the making.