“Sails Away” Exhibition: Constructed Prints by Kate Lowman

September 1-24, 2023
Reception: Saturday, September 9, 2-4 pm

These prints retain the memory of the sun, wind, and water where they began. Constructed from multiple photographs of radio-operated model sailboats, they keep the texture and detail of their originals, but the end result moves wholly or partly into abstraction. Printed on Japanese “cloud dragon” paper, many with a deckled edge, they are happy colors on a delicate paper.

Two years ago, I stumbled onto these sailboats in a storage shed belonging to a “yacht club” near my home. Initially I was interested in photographing them as entire objects. That interest kept increasing as I discovered how much I could do with their component parts, especially the sails and elements visible through the sails. I imposed shapes and changed colors in any way that suited me, trying new techniques and using old ones in novel ways. Extensive manual additions of light and shadow enhanced the sailcloth grid and developed the spaces between component parts. While the final prints are much removed from the original photographs, I wanted them to keep the feeling of those original objects, the play of sun on water, of wind in a sail.

I begin with digital material and use digital tools, but my goal is a physical object, a pigment ink print on paper. I do my own printing, using a Canon 44” printer and plenty of time. In this series, I have used a slightly translucent Japanese paper (Moab Moenkapi Unryu) which contains random “cloud dragon” fibers. Learning to use this beautiful paper effectively has been one of the pleasures of making these prints.