JESS TOWNSEND

Process Notes / The images were taken on an Obscura camera by Ilford using black and white photographic paper, and following development the images were then transformed into intaglio etchings and printed on Hannemuhle paper and Japanese gampi.

Artist Statement / I am a multidisciplinary artist who seeks the extraordinary amongst the everyday, reaching out for something elusive, even if at that very moment it has already changed or vanished. My practice is an ongoing sensory immersion of revisiting and taking time to explore a constantly changing coastal peninsula with my pinhole camera. Memory and landscape are woven throughout my work, investigating the liminal spaces in wild places between land and sea, and a timeline that shifts between the past and present. At the core of my work is an engagement with process; the simplicity of analogue pinhole photography allows me time to slow down, observe and respond to the landscape. The development of these recorded moments into intaglio etchings often reveals an unexpected element which then adopts a permanence as it changes into print. The living quality of these images build an alternating narrative between the visible and the obscured, the remembered and the imagined: a parallel world, seen through the lens of childhood memories, that, like the landscape, are quietly eroded and fade over time.