Scenes from still life – the culture of the table

The photographic images in this exhibition were inspired by sixteenth
 and seventeenth-century Dutch (and Spanish) still life paintings.
 Seemingly ordinary paintings of fruit, vegetables and ‘breakfast’ meals
 depicted in, often, quite extraordinary and surreal settings.

These photographs involve no camera or film, but were made using real
 fruit and vegetables as well as cutlery, crockery and kitchen implements.

The blue photographs are cyanotypes on watercolour paper. That is, the
 photographic image has been created by a light sensitive, iron based
 mixture which is ‘painted’ onto paper, dried and exposed to sunlight.
 These photographic images are photograms. The image created is from the
 underside of the objects placed on the light-sensitive paper. Many of
 these images have been coated and exposed more than once to build up a
 dense, layered image.

Catherine Rogers