WITH EDGES LIKE GLASS:

Turn Left When You Reach The Road Below The Moon (2024)

Ink and Gesso on Canvas, 89” x 59”, © Sid White-Jones

The Orchard (2024)

Ink and Gesso on Canvas, 79” x 59”, © Sid White-Jones

Crocus Vernus (2024)

Ink and Gesso on Canvas, 79” x 59”, © Sid White-Jones

Silver Lake Campground (2024)

Ink and Gesso on Canvas, 59” x 79”, © Sid White-Jones

Shattered Celluloid, With Edges Like Glass, Cutting Into My Fingers.

These works began as a collection of photographs not my own. Hundreds of 2x2 inch photographic slides, passed to me by chance on the last day of a house clearance.

I knew, upon receiving them, that they were to be a partial archive - the owner’s family having already removed any photographs of personal significance. Stripped of their original narrative, the remaining images felt detached, anonymous. Yet, within their new-found anonymity I saw an opportunity to reimagine them, to renew the status of these discarded transparencies as something worthy of being looked at.

In doing so, I subjected these fragile shards of film to multiple cycles of physical, chemical, and digital manipulation before fixing them to a new medium of canvas and expanding them to more than one hundred times their original size.

In this new form - more akin to painting than photography - they are harder to box away, harder to ignore.

These works have been featured within ‘With Edges Like Glass’, Cambridge Artworks, 2024 (Exhibition).