Untitled (The wall)

Untitled, a photogravure created by Nicole Clare Fraser, in collaboration with Zhané Warren is the Edition S of 2019.

The image by Fraser is of plants against a wall depicting a landscape painting. This image offers us refuge and stillness.

Fraser is a photographer that engages with analogue photography and darkroom practice. Her work can be seen as the collecting of spaces – though devoid of people, clearly suggest the human presence – ordered and composed through the lens of her camera. Her images, captured on black-and-white 35mm and medium-format film, find form within the slow and measured process of working in the darkroom.

Her slow and measured methodology is not unlike the medium in which the Edition S image is produced – Photogravure. This old (used since 1839), time-consuming and meticulous process is both an intaglio and photomechanical technique. The technique combines the details of photography with the dense pigmented inks of intaglio. The use of pigmented inks and acid free pulp paper makes photogravure the most archival print technique. For photogravure, a continuous tone film is exposed to light-sensitive pigmented gelatin tissue, which afterwards is bonded to a rosin coated copperplate. An aquatint is key to this tone-based technique. After the gelatin is developed the copperplate, with the image containing gelatin, is etched in baths of ferric chloride of different strengths. The etching commences with the extreme darks, moving through the tones to the lightest tone – pulling the etched copperplate from the ferric chloride at the moment the bite reaches the bright highlights. Thereby the technique accomplishes a full range of tones and attests to a quality fine art print.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1989, Nicole Clare Fraser studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, the University of Cape Town. She graduated in 2012 with a BA in Fine Art Majoring in Photography. Nicole’s first introduction to the darkroom was during her 11th year at high school where she took art and photography as two of her school subjects. It was here that her intrigue and sensitivity toward the medium developed. Since school she continued with darkroom work at University and thereafter has completed Darkroom Photography and Hand Printing Workshops with the highly regarded and Master Black and White printer, Dennis Da Silva, in Johannesburg. In 2018 Nicole had her first solo exhibition, a quiet place, at the gallery of the ORMS Cape Town School of Photography where she lecturers in Darkroom and Analogue Photography. Currently, Nicole works as a teacher in wet darkroom techniques and printing at FET and tertiary institutions in Cape Town.