Water Fern Ink

I love how ink looks when it meets paper. Beyond its role art, ink, in itself, is a phenomenal thing to take pleasure in. For this suite of fern images, I used two old ways to make pictures with ink - the cliché-verre technique for arriving at the images; and photogravure for the production of the prints. 

Cliché-verre is a method of picture reproduction devised in 1839 by Fox Talbot- the English inventor of photography. Later in the 1850’s, the French artists Corot, Millet, Daubigny and others used cliché-verre. The artists applied dark ink or soot from a candle to blacken glass sheets, which when dry, allowed them to scratch drawings on the glass surface. The hand-drawn image on the glass plate was then sandwiched with photographic printing paper and exposed to light in the darkroom in order to come up with a photograph of the drawing. This hybrid art form combines printmaking and photography in a delightful and inventive way. In my process, I applied black ink onto glass plates in order to draw and paint my designs. I also pressed ferns onto the still-liquid ink. In some cases, when the ink was dry, I photographed the glass plates with actual ferns resting on top of the ink to suggest other vegetative dimensions. When satisfied with the result, I scanned the glass negatives to create digital files, which in turn could be converted to allow for etching the image onto a copper plate.  

The second process used in these prints is photogravure. Photogravures are photographic images etched into copper and printed traditionally with ink. In seeking a unique way to make prints of invented imagery of ferns and water, I decided that photogravures provided the right partner to my cliché-verre pictures. Something about the way a copper etching holds and transfers ink to a beautiful paper makes for the perfect translation of an elegant process that begins in ink and ends with ink.