Agnieszka Kozłowska

The project explores the idea of deep time in specific geographical and cultural contexts, using an experimental photographic technique developed by the artist. Site-specific natural materials such as rock, soil or mineral sediments are ground to powder, mixed with a light-sensitive substance, coated onto paper and exposed in a self-constructed large format camera for several hours. In the Lower Engadin the artist used minerals from each of the numerous water springs the Swiss region is famous for to make nearly abstract photographs of the landscape. In the Oise region of France, she used Lutetian limestone utilized in the 19th c. modernisation of Paris to photograph Parc Rousseau, an 18th c. picturesque garden exemplifying the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. In North Holland, she performed a walk from Starnmeer polder to the coast and back on the longest day of the year in order to photograph the sea using soil of marine origin sourced from the polder.

Experimental relief photographs of major Alpine peaks 150 years from their first ascents. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the golden age of alpinism, I traversed the Alps and climbed up to locations overlooking selected peaks ascended for the first time by mountaineers in that period (1854-1865). Using a heretofore unexplored photographic technique, for each summit I produced a relief in a light-sensitive polymer plate exposed directly in a camera for a period ranging from several hours to several days. Read more about the project HERE.

This practice-led research project entitled Taking Photographs Beyond the Visual: Paper as a Material Signifier in Photographic Indexicality explores the status of photographs as physical traces rather than purely as images. The works were produced entirely on-site in remote alpine locations: paper was made out of plants and exposed photographically for periods of several weeks in cameras made out of natural materials, using only the inherent light-sensitivity of plant pigments. They are placed in archival boxes with location and dates of exposure embossed on the lid. A film shows my interaction with the environment in the process of making the works. The full PhD thesis is available for download HERE. Read more about the project HERE.

The idea that one photograph can document the duration of a walk is clearly ridiculous: an object cannot compete with an experience. Hamish Fulton

The Walking Project explores the possibility of communicating in the form of an artwork a subjective experience of the world understood in spatiotemporal terms and in relation to the body as the necessary subject of perception. The technical experiments with cameras and photographic materials involved in the work test the limitations of the medium in recording a walk in its continuity. Through long-exposure photographs, films, heart-rate records, sound records, maps, etc., the artist attempts the impossible: materialization of a walk in an object indexical to the distance and duration of the experience.