Nat Faulkner’s New Exhibition Revels within the Alchemy of Photography

When the rising British artist Nat Faulkner was a younger youngster, he used to order moths by mail. “You could send off for these caterpillars – cocoons and eggs. You’d hatch them, watch them go through these transformations, and then set them free.” Speaking the morning after the opening of Strong Water, his new solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre, which awarded him the Emerging Artist Award at Frieze in 2024, Faulkner is musing on his enduring fascination with states of transformation. This is a central focus of his fascinating follow, which encompasses images and photographic processes, in addition to sculpture, the medium by which he first educated. 

“I’m interested in things that happen on a scale that you can’t measure or see,” says the London-based artist, who’s represented by Brunette Coleman. “Oliver Sacks makes a great comment in his text Speed about wanting to be able to see plants move. Take a fern unfurling – no matter how long you look at it, you’ll never see it change. But if you come back two days later, it will have changed drastically. I like that timescale, because it shows you there are things happening that you aren’t able to watch, and that you can’t measure somehow.” The seen and unseen, and the issues you possibly can and might’t management, are key themes for Faulkner. They lie on the coronary heart of his new exhibition, the place, in response to Camden Art Centre, “The constant vitality of metallic substances prevails across distances and state changes, from fixed quantities to new apparitions.”

The exhibition’s first area accommodates only one art work, located within the small Victorian room’s pre-existing skylight, the glass panels of which have been overlaid with bespoke vessels containing iodine resolution (the light-sensitive chemical utilized in early daguerreotype images). As gentle filters by way of the panels, the area is rendered in an oneiric orange hue, the depth of which adjustments all through the day. The state of the liquid adjustments too, because the shifts in temperature create and dispel condensation, Faulkner tells me, whereas the iodine will develop incrementally paler because the solar bleaches it. Changeability; using supplies with a storied photographic historical past; rigorously carried out situations and a juxtaposing embrace of exterior forces: this primary work is the best introduction to what we’re about to come across, I proffer. “I think it’s a good primer for the rest of the show,” Faulkner concedes. 

The work inside the primary exhibition area – three sculptures and three photographic works – offers enlightening perception into the completely different sides of Faulkner’s follow, and the multilayered methods he each works and thinks. It is vital to know that Faulkner views his studio-cum-darkroom as its personal autonomous drive – a type of collaborator in his investigations into the constructions and mechanics of images. He describes his works as “discoveries” greater than “creations”: the byproducts of rigorously established parameters set inside his darkroom (or “machine”) to have an effect on the size, tone and depth of his photographs. “I like the idea of affecting things indirectly, so if I want to do something in my work, I don’t do it to the work itself, I do it to that machine –  it’s a very indirect gesture.” 

The exhibition’s greatest work, Untitled (Mercury Way, London), is maybe the most effective instance of this collaboration. It is an unlimited {photograph} of a pile of scrap steel, taken in a waste-metal recycling facility in Cremona, Italy, and printed onto strips of photographic paper (within the largest dimension accessible), which have then been collaged collectively. The sellotape with which the artist has hooked up the detrimental to the enlarger is included within the print, marked with a visual fingerprint writ giant, whereas the completely different panels range barely in tone in response to the instances of day the prints have been made and the corresponding surges or lulls within the electrical grid powering the enlarger – each examples of Faulkner’s curiosity in embracing likelihood and imperfection.

The sculptures on show see Faulkner’s studio within the function of each collaborator and topic, each a life-size, copper frottage aid that maps a piece of its inside – a window, floorboards and a part of a wall – through “rubbings”. These have then been electroplated by Faulkner utilizing silver recycled from X-ray movie sourced from NHS labs, which is able to tarnish and alter color over time. “An X-ray is the most invasive type of image you can have taken of yourself – it’s your interior somehow made exterior,” Faulkner explains. “That felt appropriate given that the rubbings render the interior of the studio, a very intimate and internal space for an artist, external.”

The remaining two works, aptly sufficient, are an enormous monochrome {photograph} of a darkish moth on a white backdrop, and a a lot smaller color {photograph} of the sunshine that Faulkner used to lure it to him. “During and after the Industrial Revolution, the pollution from industrial towns stained the landscape and made it darker, and this predominantly white moth with dark markings effectively changed its colour to a darker pigmentation to better camouflage itself and live longer as a species,” the artist says of his curiosity on this winged topic. “That felt like a photographic narrative to me – a kind of positive to negative, somehow, from white to black.” Somehow, for Nat Faulkner, all of it comes again to shifting states and the alchemy of images.

Nat Faulkner: Strong Water is on present at Camden Art Centre till 22 March 2026.