Lee Thomas O'Connor

I use a cyanotype printing technique, with added dry pigments to create my recent artwork. Working on film negatives, I scratch in to, draw on, or cut and assemble them before enlarging them onto light-sensitized paper. I achieve this by projecting the negatives through my homemade setup with ultraviolet light and an array of lenses. This process gives me a diffused, ethereal quality, a grainy surface that evokes a sense of emergence. Later I work on my cyanotype prints with dry pigment or pastel. With these materials I can continue the diffused textures or abruptly add geometrical sharp-edged shapes floating in the image.

For me, there is an attraction in the way the intense color of the dry pigments create a visual oscillation, affecting the color frequency against the tonal range of the cyanotype. It seems to vibrate somewhat uncomfortably, emergent from what is invisible in our environment. Although my work aesthetically derives from responses to the landscape, I am deeply interested in how they symbolize properties of emergent consciousness in the past, present, and future.