Lingam.K – RMIT School of Art Graduates

Recipient of the NAVA Ignition Award and the Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence, Master of Photography sponsored by B2Scan Highly Commended.

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MELTING ICESCAPES / BLACK LANDSCAPE

Glaciers reflect sunlight and play a critical role in maintaining the temperature on Earth. When the glaciers recede, dark surfaces of the ground are exposed, and new landscapes are created as less sunlight is reflected, resulting in the warming of Earth.

MELTING ICESCAPES / BLACK LANDSCAPE is a visualisation of the probable future of glaciers in the Himalayas due to climate change. Unknown to most, glaciers are the largest reservoir of freshwater on Earth. As humans continue to advance, our behaviours leave an unyielding impact on the landscape, resulting in significant ecological impact—an ineradicable ‘human signature’.

The work employs hand-crafted photographic processes of carbon transfer. It uses glass and carbon pigments to create effective layered imagery, encoding passed time, memory, and probable futures. Carbon transfer is a contact printing process that produces an image formed by a layer of hardened, pigmented gelatine on a surface. My work uses glass as the surface.

Carbon transfer is a contact printing process that produces an image formed by a layer of hardened, pigmented gelatine on the glass surface. To make a carbon print, a pigmented gelatine layer (carbon tissue) is coated with a light-sensitive dichromate solution. Once dry, this light-sensitive ‘carbon tissue’ is placed in contact with a negative and exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, locally hardening the carbon tissue. After exposure, the carbon tissue is soaked briefly in cool water and then squeegeed into contact with the glass surface. The image is formed by washing away portions of the pigment, leaving an image on the glass, the carbon print.