Nat Faulkner: The Stuff of Photography

Faulkner’s new work on the Camden Art Centre casts in amber the bodily and chemical strategy of image-making

Transparent panels have been put in to span the skylights of the Camden Art Centre’s upstairs lobby, every of those slim bins enclosing a shallow pool of iodine resolution (a liquid related to early daguerreotype images) above the viewer, bathing the room in an amber glow. As the sunshine from outdoors filters by way of the confined fluid, condensation types jewellike beads on the insides of the panels. With Aperture (Iodine) (all works 2026), Faulkner positions images not merely as an optical medium, however as a cloth course of, looking for out how bodily and chemical states of transformation is perhaps perceived within the making of a picture. Across three photographic works and three accompanying sculptural items, an observable stress emerges between the photographic ‘fix’, through which a second is arrested in obvious permanence, and Faulkner’s varied makes an attempt at complicating it, making us conscious of the picture’s dependence on the matter that makes it attainable.

The monumental Aqua Fortis looms over the principle gallery. Composed for probably the most a part of six massive, abutting silver-gelatin prints on a plywood mount that reaches nearly to the ceiling, the assembled monochrome prints depict an enormous scrapheap of metallic detritus. That picture nonetheless is framed by a bigger subject of black, punctuated by varied scratches of white and dashes of aluminium tape that maintain the prints collectively. At this scale, the mass of metallic and the textured whorls of fingerprints caught on the enlarged picture merge collectively on the work’s floor to provide an surprising, summary magnificence. Nearby, Moth-catcher provides a second of concentrated depth: inside a slick aluminium body, overlapping vivid crimson chromogenic prints are hemmed in by the encompassing card mount. A vibrant white mild burns out the centre of the picture, whereas illuminating a wooded scene of foliage across the margins. By documenting mild itself, Faulkner is taking part in with one other important element of the photographic course of, permitting the topic to dissolve into the supplies used to seize it.

The three silver-plated Analogue reliefs positioned across the gallery function in a different way. Here, Faulkner information his South East London studio, the place his photographic photos are made by urgent and rubbing skinny sheets of copper in opposition to explicit surfaces, then electroplating these with silver distilled and recovered from discarded X-ray movie. They are unusual objects: the shimmering surfaces, dense with the punctures and abrasions accrued by way of their making, lend them the aura of spiritual relics. Analogue II (Corridor), a small wall-mounted fragment, registers neat brickwork and a curving arch, its floor pitted with scratched graffiti. Held up with aluminium tape, set aside in a window alcove, it lacks the formal decision or spatial assertiveness of the encompassing works. Another, Analogue (Studio ground), sprawls throughout the gallery ground, pieced collectively in a fragile association tapering to a skinny level. Its parquet sample exactly mirrors the gallery’s personal flooring; it’s maybe a too-intentional literal correspondence, downplaying the position of probability and error that elsewhere animates Faulkner’s work. Yet this literal ‘grounding’ serves an essential operate, forcing us to come across the work not as a picture of a ground however as a bodily engagement with the studio’s materials existence.

The silver floor of the analogue reliefs might shift over the course of the exhibition, reacting to atmospheric situations, very similar to the liquid contained inside Aperture (Iodine). This latent chemical instability retains the works in a state of publicity, positioning them as mutable contributors inside the current setting. This shouldn’t be image-making within the conventional sense, however relatively imaging: an enigmatic strategy of realisation through which topics are extracted from the world and remade as spatial, materials propositions – transient and contingent.

Nat Faulkner, Strong water is on view at Camden Art Centre, London, through 22 March

From the March 2026 concern of ArtOverview – get your copy.

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