Fine Art Photography School of Fine Art
Demelza Kingston
I work in photography and moving image, with processes that span the analogue, digital and cameraless, often mis/using obsolete materials and technologies. Through my art practice, I consider how humans of the ancient past, the present and the future are dis/connected with the land and the more-than-human. Research, from archive to fieldwork, informs this work that I see as a speculative archaeology.
The Garden
Much of my work relates to plants — their lore, their commodification and prohibition. I see the allotment I tend, where herbs for use in photographic developers grow, as part of my studio. Choosing to work in this way, I seek to acknowledge the harm inherent in the medium of photography and to do what I can to reduce this harm, moving towards a more connected, less extractive relationship with the materials and process.
[an]d with Artemisia having a [m]irrour of steele yf thou clep any spiritts [tho]u shallt see them therin
In the series [an]d with Artemisia having a [m]irrour of steele yf thou clep any spiritts [tho]u shallt see them therin, the plant’s properties are in the fore as this work explores the lore of wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). Initially drawn intuitively to this plant in grief, as I researched this powerful plant more I realised that others had known wormwood — buramaide, bitter herb in the Gaelic — as a plant that was turned to in the process of dying, in funerary rites and in rituals of summoning spirits and scrying.
Pharmacopœia
Using expired film, old photographic papers and reclaimed objects throughout my process, I relinquish control to the materials, the seasons, the plants and the earth they grow in. Pharmacopœia is a short film on an obsolete 8 mm colour filmstock, Kodachrome.
Kodak discontinued the production of Kodachrome in 2009 and support for processing it ceased in 2010 as Kodak withdrew the complex chemistry and its tightly controlled licenses for laboratories to process it. Here I repurpose it, using homegrown plant developer to reveal the images of some of the medicinal plants growing in the allotment.
Harvest
Growing plant material for use in homemade developer takes a whole growing season from the plants’ winter sleep, to growth and harvest. Once the material is used up there is no more until the next cycle, so each sprig claims its value beyond the monetary. The spent herbs are composted and returned to the ground.
Previous work: a stone amissing
This ongoing project is a work of speculative archaeology in response to a 1893 lecture on the Standing Stones of the district of Stirling by antiquarian A. F. Hutchison. Photographs of the sites by paleobotanist Robert Kidston were ‘shown by the lime-light’ to illustrate the survey but only the text remains.
Intrigued by the idea of returning the illustrated component to the survey, I set out to find the sites described in the paper and re-photograph the stones as a kind of speculative archaeology.
