Révéler

Révéler (working title) is the beginning of a collaboration between Belinda Whitta and Lily Dowd, exploring the intersections between alternative cameraless processes and forgotten female knowledge. In making photograms both above and below the earth around the elder tree, this exhibition will bring agency to the invisibilities; the knowledge and the tactility of the tree. As the elder tree is the gateway between our everyday (middle world), and the underworld, the ground below the tree festers energy from this alternative realm. 

Belinda Whitta’s process of burying light sensitive film within the body of the ground; making a photograph, while the soil is simultaneously growing atop of the emulsion, eating away at it. In developing the film after it has been retrieved, we reveal the elements of burying that usually remain invisible. Lily Dowd’s techniques of laying photographic film and paper on top of the earth offers an opportunity for the sun to leave a residue of a moment. Shaded by foliage for 24 hour durations, the film becomes embedded by marks of what has been. 

With the contrast between Belinda’s dark mirrors into the soil, and Lily’s brighter and luminescent reflections of time passing, we create a connection between the aforementioned underworld and middleworld, using the elder tree to illustrate this. We will spend 24 hours creating these cameraless photographs with an elder tree at the centre of the process.