Photosensitive Artist Q&A with Aliki Braine

In attendance were SPGS’s very own Ms Barff, Ms Meriau and Mr Norris, former teacher Ms Nguyen, and artist Sayako Sugawara. Beginning the session, the artists were invited to discuss their own experiences with working in the cyanotype medium and the intentions behind the works. Ms Barff’s Brenda & Marion were created as commemorative banners intended to remember the stories of women in the RAF during WWII and were created by tracing shapes from WAAF uniforms at the Worthing Museum Collection. Ms Meriau’s cyanotype series and film, Mal de Mer, was inspired by her crossings of the English Channel and materials she collected during her artistic residence on the Greek island of Symi, exploring relationships of nature and bodies of water, demonstrated through both a large-scale piece and smaller prints created on the multitude of sea-sickness bags she had collected. Mr Norris’s ceramic works were inspired by the river deities Father Tamesis and Isis in the form of water-bearing jugs. Ms Nguyen utilised her own collection of herbarium plants to create abstracted, natural landscapes from pressings of flower heads and leaves. Finally, Sugawara’s Rain Cyanotypes let the natural elements become art of their own, as multiple exposures to long-awaited summer rains left patterns of water and colour across the prints.