The Lumsden Biscuit
AN EDIBLE PHOTOGRAM
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Central to Sylvia Grace Borda’s practice is an examination of lens-based technologies and photographic techniques. Her most recent work ‘Lumsden Biscuit’ functions as a series of visual inquiries in how basic imaging, the photogram, can become a exploratory and experimental as it was at its advent.
With interests in perception, photographic structures and technologies, Sylvia has mediated the photogram to become a process and phenomena to reinterpret, and re-present how imaging can evolve today. Sylvia’s Lumsden biscuit aims to create a particular kind of imagery that both identifies and challenges conventional uses and understandings of the photogram as part of a wider contemporary and conceptual photographic practice. 
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Sylvia has created perceptual bridges that examine the very conditions of image production. She has recorded a number of local flora from Lumsden flora through the photogram process, but rather than considering the work complete she has retranslated these images. Her photograms become ‘negatives’ for a series of sculptural moulds. The moulds then become the ‘negatives’ for a food production process, creating the first edible photographs. In the same way photographic printing plates, low relief copper and zinc tablets, enabled the first mass produced visuals to be distributed in newspapers and magazines – Sylvia wishes to rather than seemingly see that traditional analog photographic techniques at an end but they are again rather at a beginning with new complementary processes moving these techniques into broader channels for distribution and consumption.
Sylvia believes that the difficulty we face in terms of understanding photography is less to do with its complexity but rather an unwillingness to re-explore older methods from which to better understand and challenge what is possible with photographic futures. Read more about the project's social and collaborative dimensions here |
