Imagine light as a river: it flows and bends and embraces the obstacles it finds in its way, and in the process it shapes them and allows them to be seen as they are.

My interest was piqued by my experience in film photography. Photography owes its existence to light; it uses its properties to reproduce the world on a flat surface. Despite the intangibility of light, it is able to leave a mark on the surface of the film, it carves itself into it. I wondered if light could in fact be viewed as a physical element, if there was some way to identify its tangible characteristics.

I equate light to a liquid, the fourth state of water. Liquids do not have a shape of their own: light bends around physical obstacles and shapes itself on their image. With this in mind I set the camera aside and began experimenting in the darkroom to create a series of photograms. I used liquids like ink and water to create unusual shapes, allowing the light to flow around them and mark them on the paper.

My current experiments are lumen printed. The process makes use of a chemical reaction between light and photographic paper, where the surface darkens when touched by the light, removing the step that involves developing the image. This is the most direct printing process through the use of light alone, only requiring the print to be fixed in order to halt the process.

The effect light has on paper and film is proof of its physicality. Despite its incorporeal form, the shapes emerging on the paper show how it is able to interact with the world and bring into existence.