Glynn Vivian Gallery - The Moon and a Smile

Tiffany Charlotte
Mar 7, 2017
1 min read

The Moon and a Smile responds to a period in the 1840's and 1850's, when Swansea was at the centre of photography experimentation. Commissioned by the gallery nine international artists have created artworks for this exhibition in response to original photographs from this era.

I'm really interested in darkroom photography, I took an A Level in photography during my time at sixth form and really enjoyed creating darkroom experiments, seeing what worked and what didn't under the lights and watching my photos develop in the chemicals, it's always been something I'm fascinated in yet never really used this skill so far in my Surface Pattern degree. Perhaps it will be something I use in the future now this exhibition has reminded me of my absolute love for it.

In this exhibition there were a small collection of photographs that took my interest, these were created by Melanie Rose & Neeta Madahar. They were a series of either black and white or blue images of orchids and ferns. I like how the detail of the orchid flora was kept in the process of creating the artworks but there are inclusions of textures and spillages, hinting at the darkroom process as I know how difficult it is to get a perfect image! These images were so captivating and I'd love to go see them again another time to be able to have another up close and personal look.