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 is inspired and follows Joseph Michael Gandy's 1830 watercolour 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 façades are the last remains of soane's work on the bank and my photographs trace the stages of sandblasting on the building’s surface—an act of cleaning and peeling away the layers of history weathering and decay. Whilst the photographs depict the façades during a two year process of cleaning, multiple versions of the facades—before, during, and after cleaning—capture different realities of the building and often of the same façades, challenging the ontological order and playing with photographic indexicality. The act of erasure, whether through sandblasting or during the photographic printing process of dodging and burning, can manifest as lighter or darker areas in the prints, blurring the line between presence and absence thus challenging the viewer’s perception. 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. 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.