STRATUM
(2014 - 2016)
Stratum is a series of 30 silver-gelatin prints, made with large-format cameras and printed in the darkroom, documenting the details of the late 18th-century facades of the Bank of England, designed by the renowned British architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837). The project followed Joseph Michael Gandy's 1830 watercolor drawing titled A Bird’s-eye View of the Bank of England. Although often referred to as 'The Bank in ruins,' the drawing was commissioned by Soane as a cutaway representation, resulting in an ambiguous image that simultaneously suggests both the construction and decay of the building.
The photographs trace the stages of sandblasting on the building’s surface—an act of cleaning and peeling away the layers of architecture as an institutional act of representation.
The series plays with the concept of indexicality, as multiple versions of the facades—before, during, and after cleaning—capture both the reality of the building anf its subtle variations and the ontological challenges of photography. The act of erasure, whether through sandblasting or photographic processing, can manifest as lighter or darker prints, blurring the line between presence and absence and challenging the viewer’s perception of reality.
The work activates a dialogue between architecture, representation, and time. The photographic process, as in architecture, is a process of erosion and loss is central to its being—whether through the chemical erosion of silver halide particles in analog photography or the physical erosion of the building’s surface through weathering (and in this exampe sandblasting and cleaning). These multiple acts of erasure within the series expose the medium of photography as inherently occupied with "cleaning" reality in the act of representing it, embodying the fragile connection between the material world and its depiction.