The Cleanest Touch | Ground & Sky Imprints
2024 - ongoing
2024 - ongoing
Work Details:
A traveling, site-responsive project that unfolds through guided sensorial immersions in natural environments. These encounters give rise to series of handmade cyanotypes, produced in different sizes and on various materials, functioning as harvested traces of embodied contact between skin, ground, and place.
A traveling, site-responsive project that unfolds through guided sensorial immersions in natural environments. These encounters give rise to series of handmade cyanotypes, produced in different sizes and on various materials, functioning as harvested traces of embodied contact between skin, ground, and place.
For The Cleanest Touch, a digital print felt like a rupture — a dissonance with the slow, sensuous, and embodied process from which the images emerge. To preserve the integrity of the work, I turned to handmade photographic techniques that allow images to be revealed through direct contact with elemental forces: embossed by the ground, exposed by the sky. I chose cyanotype for its unpredictability and responsiveness to light, matter, and time. The process resists control, mirroring the project’s ethos of surrendering agency and allowing collaboration between body, earth, and sunlight.
The Cleanest Touch is between our skin and Earth’s skin. Through rest and gravity, both surfaces meet and register one another, producing textured imprints — a collaborative graphic work formed by the body and the ground beneath it. Abstract in appearance yet deeply sensuous, the images are not representations but traces: residues of an immersive, contemplative practice of deep resting in nature.
The project began as a personal practice of healing from a chronic condition, and as an inquiry into my perception of the threshold between body and landscape. It later expanded into a guided immersive process, inviting participants, through verbal poetic cues, to gradually return to ground, release habitual holding, and bond with gravity as the love force between the us and our planet.
If the project were an iceberg, the photographs would be only its visible tip. Beneath lies an extended embodied process involving skin, ground, and gravity.
“The terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within the terrain.”
— David Abram
— David Abram
Process
The resting phase of a guided immersion on the volcanic shore of Ibusuki, Japan. Se more here.
Material Traces
Process: toning with green tea
Process: toning with green tea
Process: the making of the cyanotypes
Process: the making of the cyanotypes
In a time of accelerated digital production, choosing cyanotype is a way of slowing the image down, allowing it to remain tethered to light, time, and touch. The project insists on slowness and bodily presence as forms of resistance and care.
The Cleanest Touch 01
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 02
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 03
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 04
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 05
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 06
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 07
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 08
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 09
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 10
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 11
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 12
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 13
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 14
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
The Cleanest Touch 15
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
Hand-toned cyanotype on cotton paper,
skin imprint formed through rest and gravity.
Variable dimensions.
