Sylvia Grace Borda | Artist Website
  • Mise en Scene
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  • Farm Tableaux - Google Street View
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    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2020-21
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2017-19
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2013-14
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2010-12
  • Interrogations of a Camera
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    • Public Art Commission: Number 4 Pump Station
    • Community Engagement: Seeing Across Boundaries
    • Public Art Commission: Cuneo Camera Obscura
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    • EK Modernism series
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    • Canada series
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  • Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC
  • This one's for the farmer
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    • Edible photograph
  • What are you doing Richmond
  • Snow Cameras
  • Hunting Cameras
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    • Architecture
    • Preplanning design
    • House as Social Agent
    • Generous Architecture
  • Digital Art
  • Shifting Perspectives Book
  • Mise en Scene
    • Mise en Scene
  • Farm Work
  • Farm Tableaux - Google Street View
  • Aerial Fields
  • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2020-21
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2017-19
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2013-14
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2010-12
  • Interrogations of a Camera
  • This is not a camera
  • Impressions
  • Seeing Technologies
  • Northern Ireland
    • Coming to the Table
    • Orchards
  • Kissing Project
  • Past Projects
    • Public Art Commission: Number 4 Pump Station
    • Community Engagement: Seeing Across Boundaries
    • Public Art Commission: Cuneo Camera Obscura
  • Artist Bio
    • Artist Bio
    • Teaching Practice
    • Public Speaking
    • Request a lecture
    • Purchasing Art
  • Exhibition History
    • Exhibition History
    • Reviews
  • Contact
  • News
  • Camera Histories
  • Momento Mori
  • Stereoworks
    • Two if not Three
    • Aura
    • Viewpoints
    • This is not a camera
  • re-COLLECT-ing
  • EK Modernism
    • EK Modernism series
    • Project legacies
    • Canada series
  • A Holiday in Glenrothes
  • Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC
  • This one's for the farmer
  • Social engagement
  • Lumsden Biscuit
    • Social Enterprise
    • Edible photograph
  • What are you doing Richmond
  • Snow Cameras
  • Hunting Cameras
  • Architecture
    • Architecture
    • Preplanning design
    • House as Social Agent
    • Generous Architecture
  • Digital Art
  • Shifting Perspectives Book
Impressions
Digital C-41 cyanotypes and montages of antique paper prints | 2013

In
Impressions
Sylvia addresses the relationships between culture, and technology by blending digital and analog photography principles together.  Her work borrows from Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), the founding father of the cyanotype or blueprint, ideas that photographic process would revoluntionise the copying and distribution of visual content. These ideas are somewhat akin to digital technologies wherein everything can be duplicated. Like the Internet Herschel believed the cyanotype could create a revolution in how work was copied and distributed. In her series she creates a condensed history of photographic ideas by capturing literally image impressions of 16th-17th C works to become independent aesthetic works

By fusing early imaging ideas together prior to the advent of photography with emblematic forms from their time - scientific etchings of the flora and the body, viewers are given an opportunity to move through a visual strata of time and content production. In Impressions she has digitally captured traces left behind of obscure 16th-17th century illustrated prints left behind on facing pages. These faint images appear similar to the image outlines made by the first cameras. Rather than seeing media as separate, analog or digital, the artist has blended early photographic aspirations and goals together with hand-made processes and the digital sensor in order to create a new recombinant process.

Her colour reversed digital renderings of etching impressions are produced as image negatives. The original hues of the etched papers when reversed become blue appearing much akin to photographic cyanotypes. Interestingly the origin of the word “photography” hinted at its publishing potential by combining the Greek words for light and writing. The term ‘photography’ also coined by Herschel hints at a new revolution in printing and mechanical reproduction that both the camera and the digital sensor have brought to the foreground. In this series the viewer is given a window to explore and transcend a visual strata of time, technology and observation through a fusion of digital and pre-photographic aesthetics.

Digital cyanotype prints |  2013 



Project review
“Artist folio: Impressions” in Studies in Photography Scotland published by The Scottish Society for the History of Photography, December 2013.

Dickson, Malcolm. "Dreaming of cyanotypes - the Yin and the Yang of image making," in the book Blueprint Publisher Glasgow Print Studio and Streetlevel Photoworks ISBN 978-0-9569054-6-8 2013.

Impressions was presented at Streetlevel Photoworks as part of BLUEPRINT Exhibition (February 8 - March 31, 2013)
see an artist video presentation, entitled, 'Agency of Light,' wherein Sylvia describes the histories of cyanotype printing and its relationship to the development of photogram process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIvLjCzhltI

 

  • Mise en Scene
    • Mise en Scene
  • Farm Work
  • Farm Tableaux - Google Street View
  • Aerial Fields
  • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2020-21
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2017-19
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2013-14
    • Cameras and Watercolour Sunsets 2010-12
  • Interrogations of a Camera
  • This is not a camera
  • Impressions
  • Seeing Technologies
  • Northern Ireland
    • Coming to the Table
    • Orchards
  • Kissing Project
  • Past Projects
    • Public Art Commission: Number 4 Pump Station
    • Community Engagement: Seeing Across Boundaries
    • Public Art Commission: Cuneo Camera Obscura
  • Artist Bio
    • Artist Bio
    • Teaching Practice
    • Public Speaking
    • Request a lecture
    • Purchasing Art
  • Exhibition History
    • Exhibition History
    • Reviews
  • Contact
  • News
  • Camera Histories
  • Momento Mori
  • Stereoworks
    • Two if not Three
    • Aura
    • Viewpoints
    • This is not a camera
  • re-COLLECT-ing
  • EK Modernism
    • EK Modernism series
    • Project legacies
    • Canada series
  • A Holiday in Glenrothes
  • Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC
  • This one's for the farmer
  • Social engagement
  • Lumsden Biscuit
    • Social Enterprise
    • Edible photograph
  • What are you doing Richmond
  • Snow Cameras
  • Hunting Cameras
  • Architecture
    • Architecture
    • Preplanning design
    • House as Social Agent
    • Generous Architecture
  • Digital Art
  • Shifting Perspectives Book