The collaborating artists of REDACTION TOOLKIT respond to both personally-sensed, speculative contexts, and real-world, disaster conflicts. Using the concept of the rosary (a prayer device used in some christian practices to seek penance for sins), Stirling Kain’s body of work, You are the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking, considers how communities might make sense of suffering: an infliction of wrath that requires atonement.
For Kain, the darkroom is a quasi-church: a site of transformation and ritual, where the repetitive movements and intense focus demanded by wet plate collodion mirrors the experience of using a rosary. Building on Kain’s practice of these nineteenth century photographic workflows, and the texts of medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the artist conceives this body of work as a speculative, photographic rosary.
You are the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking consolidates modern darkroom and film practices, and nineteenth century wet plate collodion workflows (with which Kain is already familiar), alongside a technique new to the artist: the surrealist photographic technique of solarisation (invented by Lee Miller and Man Ray). This body of work incorporates techniques from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: the artist repeatedly incorporates history into her work.
In this, and previous bodies of work, the artist photographically engages with the texts of Hildegard von Bingen through photographic processes and imagery. The title, You are the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking, is inspired by Hildegard’s 1151/2 The Play of the Virtues—the first written, medieval morality play. This play revolves around the interactions between a lost soul, Anima, and personified Virtues, Knowledge of God, Humility, Victory, and the Devil.
For REDACTION TOOLKIT, Kain reflects on grief as a workflow during collaboration. She recognises the disorientation of grief: specifically, the way quotidian realities lay next to the realities of heightened anguish, pain, and loss. In this exhibition, Kain manipulates materials and processes familiar to her (glass and aluminium photographic substrates, and silver nitrates) to intervene in others’ media of choice. She embraces these interventions, whether they do or do not reconcile materially and aesthetically.
You are the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking was created at Atwell House and Gallery (@atwellhousearts) darkroom studio, with the support of City of Melville.
‘REDACTION TOOLKIT’
Jacob Canet-Gibson, Stirling Kain, Harrison Waed See, Jordee Stewart
LIGHT WORKS (112 Murray St, Boorloo)
OPENING EVENT: 6pm – 8pm, Sat (28 Feb), opened by Martina Mrongovius, performance by Jacob Canet-Gibson
DURATION: 12pm – 5pm, Sat (28 Feb) – Sun (1 Mar) & Thu (5 Mar) – Sat (7 Mar)
OUTCOME UNKNOWN (music): 7pm – 9pm, Thu (5 Mar)
ARTIST TALK: 2pm – 3pm, Sat (7 Mar)
MOVING IMAGE LAP PERTH (films): 5.30pm – 7.30pm, Sat (7 Mar)
Stirling Kain 