Archive
Exhibition Archive
‘Hold Collective’ left to right: Elissa Jane-Diver, Susan Bell, Eileen White and Gin Rimmington Jones.
‘Eileen White, Hand-coated glass slides, developed in plant-based developer, handmade light boxes. using recycled frames.
From L to R, ‘Crab Wood 1’ 43 × 34 × 5 cm, ‘Crab Wood 4’ 29.5 x 35.5 × 5 cm and ‘Crab Wood 2’ 21 x 27 cm. 2023
‘Common Ground’ - Hold Collective
Photo Fringe 2024 - Collectives Hub: Phoenix Gallery, Brighton
5 October - 17 November 2024
4 photographic artists, Susan Bell, Elissa Jane Diver, Gin Rimmington Jones and Eileen White, formed ‘Hold Collective’ in 2024. Together, they responded to the annual Photo Fringe, a photographic festival held at Phoenix Gallery in Brighton. 2024’s theme was ‘Common Ground’. This became the starting point for positive change for collaboration and connection, disrupting traditional hierarchies and encouraging a mutually beneficial exchange of perspectives, skills and ideas.
Exhibition Archive
‘Symbiosis 2’
London Alternative Photographic Collective
Four Corners Gallery, London
15 - 18 May 2024
A group exhibiuton of altenative photographers and members of The London Alternative PHotographic Collective.
‘Anenome 4’. 2023
42 x 42 cm, box frame
Collaged Silver Gelatin black and white prints on waste food packaging using dry plate hand-coated photographic plates and a compost-based developer. The prints are pinned together and held in a box frame
Exhibition Archive
‘The Now and the Far’
Middlesbrough Art Week - Auxillary projects
26 September - 5 October 2024
The title, IN THE NOW AND THE FAR, seeks to negotiate the overlap and differences between cultural production and political action. Who has the right to take action?What does art & social practice look like? When is the moment, and who is in the room?
The exhibition discusses the attitudes, frameworks and timescales that inform the way that we make and share work, and in turn, how this helps us reimagine the communities we live in. How does the uneven distribution (of power, time, resources, and capacity) shaped social movements of the past, and how this in turn, might act as the imaginative scaffold for the future.
The works chosen for the exhibiton were created during a residency at the Chelsea Physic Garden, a four-acre site on the banks of the River Thames in London, which was established 350 years ago by Apothecaries as a place to grow medicinal plants. It is a place of education and healing. It enabled Eileen to take a botanical journey through deep time, both historically, scientifically and seasonally.
‘Propagation’ and ‘Transmutation’ were made using painstakingly slow processes that are in direct opposition to our linear timescales and current obesity of image making. Hand coated glass plates made from charity shop finds were shot using an antique field camera. Relying entirely on what was presented in a variety of waste bins, compost from the site was transformed in her kitchen to a less toxic plant-based developer, and consumer food or photographic waste packaging was turned into alternative substrates, which were printed individually before being collaged together.
The work is unique as well as facilitating an ongoingness through the acts of recycling. This creates new forms of attention, sensitivity and narratives with regard to the urgency that exists in the Anthropocene. How to live in harmony with the Earth and each other.
‘Propagation’ and ‘Transmutation’ 2023
116 x 98 cm and 120 × 94 cm
Silver Gelatin collaged photographs on recycled packaging using hand coated large format glass slides and and plant-based developer.
Exhibition Archive
‘Symbiosis’
London Alternative Photographic Collective
100 Years Gallery, London
15 - 18 May 2024
‘Symbiosis’ is a group exhibition exploring the relationship between image makers, the more-than-human, and alternative photographic processes. When working with analogue and alternative photographic processes, light, water, and botanicals are harvested to expose, process, tone and transform work. During this transformation, there is a dependency on non-human elements.
An exhibition organised by London Alternative Photography Collective at 100 Years Gallery, Hoxton. Organised by Melanie King @melaniekatking , Ky Lewis @kylewis1 and Hayley Harrison @hayley_harrison_ .
‘Vista 1 & 2’ 2023
42 x 42 cm, box frame
Silver Gelatin black and white prints on dry plate hand-coated photographic plates using a compost-based developer. The prints are mounted in a back lit box frame.
Exhibition Archive
‘Royal College of Art Graduate Show’
Truman Brewery, London
13 - 16 July 2023
Final Degree Show for the recent graduates of the Royal College of Art MA Programme. This was an especially celebratory event due to this being the last cohort of students studying the 2-year full-time Master’s Degree alongside all students having undergone their studies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Transmutation’
120 × 94 cm
‘Propagation’
116 × 98 cm
Collaged consumer waste packaging coated in liquid emulsion, plant-based developer. Images sourced from hand-coated dry slides taken with an antique Watson field camera whilst during a residency at The Chelsea Physic Garden in London
Vitrine containing hand-applied emulsion to packaging, text piedes, ‘Entanglements’ Limited Edition of 9 Publications
15 x 10 x 2.5 cm
Hand-made cloth-bound and letterpress printed clamshell box, using recycled card. Containing one recycled paracetamol box with hand-printed silver gelatin print of snowdrops, patient information leaflet.
Exhibition Archive
‘A quiet resistance’
Safehouse 1, Copeland Road, Peckham. London.
October 2024
This exhibition brought together 7 Royal College of Art graduates whose practices share an attentiveness towards contemporary relationships between human and non-human entities and a materiality dealing with an ongoing becoming-with, a ’Sympoiesis’*. Featuring sculpture, photography and print, the works conversed with each other as well as resonated with the space in this beautifully crumbling ruin of a home that is now a gallery
Eileen White, Charlotte Cooper, Leonie Cameron, Helen Clarke, Abi Frekelton, Katie Spragg and Marie LInsdell
*‘Sympoiesis’ is a simple word; it means ‘making with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organising.’ Donna J. Haraway, ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 58.
‘Transmutation’ 2023
107 x 140 cm
Silver Gelatin print using hand-coated large-format glass slides and plant-based developer.
‘‘Sympoesis’ 2023
165 x 127 cm
Phytogram of snowdrops from CPG/residency using expired 5 x 7 film. Enlarged and developed using a plant-based developer.
Interior view showing work by Helen. Clarke and Charlotte Cooper.
‘Snowdrops’ 2023
58 x 49.5 cm
Silver Gelatin print using a hand-coated dry plate on expired paper and plant-based developer.
‘Anenome’ 2023
60 × 45 cm
Silver Gelatin print using a hand-coated dry plate on recycled consumer waste packaging and plant-based developer.
Exhibition Archive
’The extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other’ 2023
65 x 125 cm
Collaged Silver Gelatin prints on expired photogaphic paper, plant-based developer
‘BRINK’
Royal College of Art, Hanger Gallery, Howie Road, Battersea, London
19 - 24 May 2023
A group show by current students at The Royal College of Art, London.
’The extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other’ was made in a response to a recent residency at The Chelsea Physic Garden. Methods of printmaking in the broadest sense have become a way of thinking about process as a formative practice of life and a life-shaping medium, addressing the urgent need for sustainable art practices in relation to the current ecosystem and climate breakdown.
Exhibition Archive
Humber Eco Fest
Arcade Space 3 Hepworth’s Arcade Silver Street Hull
22 October – 11 November 2023
This exhibition showcases work by collaborators of the Sustainable Darkroom, who use alternative photographic techniques and sustainable developing processes in their practice.
The Sustainable Darkroom was founded by Hannah Fletcher in 2019, and is a research community of artists, writers, filmmakers, and practitioners who are interested in lowering the ecological impacts of their work by reimagining waste as resource.
Artists: Hannah Fletcher, Edd Carr, Martha Cattell, Felix Loftus, Anna Lukala, Elle Pickering, Eileen Whiter and James Sewell
‘Hauntings 1’ 2023
25 x 35 x 2.5 cm. Box framed
Silver gelatin print using plant-based chemistry. Recycled paracetamol packaging with an image of snowdrops.
'Sympoiesis1 ‘ 2023
' Silver Gelatin Print, expired paper, plant developer.
61 x 78 cms
Exhibition Archive
‘Bran Sands, South Gare’ 2019
200 × 80 cm
Cyanotype print botanically toned.
‘Osmosis’
Espacio Gallery, London
A 'Degrees of Freedom' Production
19 - 24 May 2023
The majority of images in this exhibition relate to the constantly changing face of this coastal area on the edge of the North East coastline in Teesside.. Different historical times are captured in the eroding or partially dismantled remnants that appear or disappear depending on the tides and weather. For example, in 'Wreckage of the 19th ship’, there are the archaeological remains of a vessel from a time when many ships were lost entering the river before the two breakwaters were built. 'Powder Wharf' remains teetering and alludes to a period when this site was used by either the Royal Navy for the unloading of explosive ordnance during the First World War or when mine-laying submarines were based in the river. In all the images, the industrial capacity to manufacture steel can be seen; 'Bran Sands, South Gare' shows the cranes that were once used for this purpose in the distance.
The ‘flaneurie' of the chance encounters with a place is an essential contingency supplied through the photographic process. Each of these prints is unique. They are made using ancient light and as many sustainable, slow and low-tech elements as possible. All Film negatives were developed in homemade rosemary chemistry, and each print was developed using a variety of plant-based chemistry from the site, which gives each one its unique tonal qualities. They bear the marks of the making and the terroir.
The hand written text piece is a transcript of a conversation between residents about the recent conservative local government decision, led by Nadine Doris, to demolish the Dorman Tower. This tower was an iconic 183-foot (56-meter) Brutalist concrete coal bunker built between 1953 and 1956 on the former Redcar steelworks site near Middlesbrough. As a prominent symbol of Teesside’s industrial heritage, it was briefly listed as Grade II before being demolished in a controlled explosion in September 2021., a symbol of local pride and was in the throes of gaining listing consent when it was ‘illegally’ demolished during the night.
Exhibition Archive
‘Hold Collective’ left to right: Elissa Jane-Diver, Susan Bell, Eileen White and Gin Rimmington Jones.
From L to R, ‘Shards 1’ 43 × 34 × 5 cm, Shards 2’ 29.5 x 35.5 × 5 cm and ‘Thames Foreshore’ 21 x 27 cm. 2023
offset litho prints
‘Beyond Silver’ London Alternative PhotographicCollective
The Hive Birmingham
18 January - 10 February 2023
‘Beyond Silver’ explores the relationships between analogue photography and metallurgy by considering, for example, the extractive and colonial histories relating to the use of silver in photography, as well as shining a light on many of the other metals that are used within photographic image production, in both historical and contemporary practice..
Each piece of Eileen’s work in the exhibiton were a combination of solar plate etchings on steel and lithography on aluminium using UV light and ink. The images are washed-up ‘finds’ and pinhole photographs from the Battersea foreshore of the Thames River in London. This river with its tidal ebbs and flows, holds its own stories. The physical objects, remnants of glass and pottery that emerge as the result of a chance encounter, connect us to both time and geography, local and global manufacturing as well as human stories. The slow and low-tech photographic and printing processes reinstate the human and ways of making that relate to archiving and collecting, exploring themes such as loss, mourning, migration and the urban landscape, whilst encouraging a reconsideration of the act of looking itself.
Exhibiting artists:
Ignacio Acosta, Victoria Ahrens, William Arnold, Alex Boyd, Alice Cazenave, Caitriona
Dunnett, Hannah Fletcher, Jo Gane, Kate Goodrich, Martha Gray, Charlotte Greenwood,
Constanza Isaza, Elissa Jane Diver, Soham Joshi, Melanie King, Liane Lang, Sara Mulvey,
Andrés Pardo, Oliver Raymond-Barker, Megan Ringrose, Kris Skyla, Sayako Sugawara, Diego
Valente, Eileen White
Exhibition Archive
‘Crab Wood 3’ 2022. silver gelatin pinhole photo, plant-based developer, toned with ash.
20 × 13 cm
‘Edgelands’
The Yellow Table Gallery, Truro
5 October - 17 November 2024
Gourp show curated by Emma Hambley around the themes of care and the environment..
Exhibition Archive
‘PhotoFrome’
Frome Library, Somerset
24 June - 12 July 2023
‘Entanglement’ 2023
Handmade clam shell box, containing PIL with text and letterpress, paracetamol box printed with image of snowdrops developed in plant-based developer.
