What are the motivations for exploring photography on 3D surfaces?

In this blog photographic artist Jo Howell shares with us her thoughts and experience across 10 different photography makes.

As an impoverished working class disabled artist based in the North East of England I can safely say that your support on Patreon is always appreciated! Plus you get exclusive content!

1. Wall hangings from demo prints 2024

I haven’t created a post about all the bizarre ways that I have been using cyanotype photography process in my own artworks. I hope you enjoy my various forays into the 3rd dimension.

What happens when images take up physical space? When an image jumps from flat to all kinds of shapes and sizes?

My latest sculptural cyanotype artworks are specifically designed to make use of the waste leftover from teaching. There’s still quite a few of these left to build. I am really enjoying the process. I don’t know where it’s going but I am having fun nonetheless.

Employing watercolour paper, three different hole punchers, metal chain links and wood. The process has allowed me to explore shape and form. Using the demo pieces like this moves them further away from a photograph and into the realm of factory components. Waste images. Probably spanning at least 10 years through the various prints.

So far I’ve made 7 of these wall hangings. It was nice to throw them up on the wall in the exhibition to see how they live in space. I think they break up the rectangular shapes of the other artworks in there without looking garish.

I have made them as segments so you can display altogether as a coherent show.

Dear London or New York, Tokyo or Paris get in touch to host the maddest photography show! Photo craft.

---

2. Cyanotype on fabric wall hanging of Gertrude Bell 2024

In this project I used a combination of source images from Newcastle Universities Gertrude Bell archive alongside new images to create cyanotype art. The starting point for the images was a crude digital photo montage of Gertie’s head upon an Assyrian wall carving and the sacred handbag was replaced with a supermarket bag for life.

This is obviously a fun and light hearted approach to the Queen of the desert. The local author had written about Gertie’s entourage carrying her tin bath and luggage through the desert. Oh how the other half lived whilst we have to suffer and carry our own shopping inside.

---

3. Winter parade cyanotype lanterns 2023

This was a fun community project done with The Cultural Spring for the South Shields Winter parade. I worked with the cubs and beavers on smaller lanterns that they could carry in the parade.

The huge lantern is a photograph by one of the participants from South Tyneside age concern. The photograph was done excellently of South Shield’s town square. I upscaled his work using multiple A4 acetate negatives that I taped together to create the large lantern sides.

The large lantern frame was also made by one of the Age Concern participants out of heavy duty garden canes and insulation tape! I used eyelets to string the fabric into place and I used a high power LED umbrella light to illuminate it from the inside.

The smaller lanterns I made from heavy duty white gift bags. I cut out the sides to give us a frame with a handle. The images were printed using cyanotype onto vegan vellum and the light was a colour changing puck light. They were easy to make. Easy to carry. And they looked really good! The smaller ones shown here were test pieces but they were pretty awesome as well.

---

4. From cyanotype to metal to way-markers for Shildon #GemTrail 2021 to 2024

I used different ways of transforming the cyanotype photography done with community groups in Shildon and the Trimdons. Commissioned by Discover Brightwater and Groundwork’s North East. The Gem Trail takes you from the Locomotion museum up through Timothy Hackworth Park and onto the library on the Main Street.

The project was for 9 sculptures and a trail. Now I’ve done one I would know to negotiate the amount of installations down or the amount of money up! You live and you learn!

I’m proud of what I managed to produce. These pieces should be en situ for another 8 years.

I particularly love the portrait of Jane Hackworth. I decided that she deserved her own blue plaque for services to the community, the railways and to give her a presence that was lacking before we made this. Hand printed on a paper doily the painted portrait from the archive was scanned and turned into a negative for the print.

This sculpture sits proudly on the wall outside of the church where she was buried and within eye-line of her husband’s bronze statue.

It’s easy to overlook women’s history in such masculine landscapes. The railway towns are all about the engineers and inventors. Or about the miners. Quietly in the background those stories are there – we just have to keep putting them out there.

---

5. Rotundas, shop windows and billboards for #wearexperimenting 2018

This causes me problems already.

Is an architectural intervention or a window display a sculpture?

Well, fudge. I’m not sure.

I am including these pieces because they are some of the largest public space interventions that I have had the pleasure to create. Working with fantastic partners NEPN and The Cultural Spring to work with the people of Sunderland to explore the crossroads between science and photography in a fun accessible way.

It was a diamond project. Thrilling, liberating, community focused and bloody hard work. I really got the time and space to work with people and to try out new ideas. Loved it. Wish I could manage a commission like this every couple of years!

For the project I used cyanotypes, pinhole photography, solargraphs, lumen prints and instant photography to create source artworks with the public that we could then curate and reinterpret in different ways. We made 100s of artworks! It was an amazing creative vehicle for my own development as an artist.

Prior to the #wearexperimenting project I had been exploring sculptural pinhole cameras that I displayed with the original pinhole photographs, paper negatives and printing those through a commercial printing company on to metal. I might be able to find some of those examples for another blog.

Anywho, it is a theme that keeps creeping back into my head. That niggling OCD that keeps churning through my mind “what if?“

I think the idea of interventions in different places needs more exploration.

Where is the craziest place that I can show cyanotypes? Is it cheating to use cyanotype in the design process but to commercially print and install work?

---

6. Cyanotype Wreaths

Off cuts and components come together in a systematic layering of cyanotype artworks to explore TIME.
The dandelion clock is a great motif that stirs memories of blowing away the seeds. Circular puffs of fragile potential life. A lot of my work is drawn to circular presentation.

I see the circle as the most perfect geometric shape. Closely followed by all the triangles. Though I’ve not tried triangular presentation… it doesn’t have the soft wholeness of a circle.

---

7. Laser cut cyanotype models

You can buy reasonably cheap laser cut models that you can build yourself. In these pieces I use the cyanotype to wrap the objects. I include a cut out of ladies in Shildon Co Durham, as this project was all about the river and the railways.

I engage people through making cyanotype sprints with them and then I take the source materials they made and I play with them.

I honestly think that the way to eventually create something of consequence is to make as much as you can!

---

8. Cyanotype birdhouses

This felt like a natural progression from the railway models. The commission was from Discover Brightwater and it was to create an art trail in collaboration with the local community.

We wanted to include Timothy Hackworth park as a nice connection to the landscape. I wanted functional cyanotype birdhouses. I started by creating small versions.

I liked the aesthetic but now for the functionality. Is it even possible to cure cyanotype enough that it won’t react to the elements?

This is when I began testing theories for outdoor display. The first thought was a lick of wood varnish.

This is where things started to get weird and interesting. Cyanotype is a really hardy chemistry but even once washed that chemistry is still performing chemical reactions with its surroundings all the time. In bright sunlight the blue will fade to white. If it can’t breathe it will dull the blue and if it’s damp it will decay.

The fact that it is so reactive that the only way to get functional birdhouses was to vinyl decal them.

---

9. Installation cyanotype artwork and site specific

Art that exists in, of and because of a particular object. Everything has its own narrative. Each scuff or mark imbued with the memory of that moment. The botany cabinet belonged to Mary Eleanor Bowes and thus began the odyssey of our bizarre kinship. 250 years apart.

This installation is created using flowers from Gibside (Mary Eleanor’s estate), my own yarden and paper from The Countess of Strathmore. A book that Mary Eleanor was forced to write by her abusive 2nd husband.

I like the idea of photographic objects that you might bring back to a location of relevance to photograph en situ.

Again a playful feedback loop of creation. Loose and liberal. Intuitive.

If the photograph is an object in the real world then you can start to play with how you might read it.

---

10. Cyanotype figures

These are hilariously dumb but I can’t stop making them! I might animate them to life.

They’re not finished yet either but finished enough to grasp the intention. There needs to be an army in of these little monsters. Totally liberating to be ridiculous at times. We put far too much pressure on ourselves to be serious about everything all of the time. Humour is human.

I have updated this article to include some of my newest works in progress. I’d love to hear what you think or even see some of your own versions!