Francesca Gardner, a Harding Scholar in her 2nd year of a PhD in English, has created the embroidered cyanotype "Ariadne" (2024). This work is pictured above, and will be featured in the Cosmoscope Exhibition at the Torriano Meeting House in London throughout March 2024.
Writing about this work, Francesca says:
"A cyanotype is created by combining potassium ferricyanide with ferric ammonium citrate and prepping robust paper with the mixture, either overlaying a photograph as a transparent negative so that it prints as a positive image, or attaching objects (e.g. plants, buttons, pasta) which will print negatively. It is then left out in the sun to react to UV radiation, and afterwards treated with cold water.
Ariadne’s red thread leads Theseus out of the labyrinth in the Greek myth. I printed the labyrinth in negative by covering the surface of a cyanotype with a positive image instead of a negative one, so that instead the red thread reinscribes its walls. This piece is a reflection on the story of Ariadne: she betrays her father and her country for love, only to be tragically betrayed by Theseus in turn, abandoned on the island of Naxos. The labyrinth was inspired by the design on a c.300-270 BC coin from Knossos.
Dropping water onto a cyanotype as it reacts leads to unpredictable results, speckling the paper. The background gradually came to resemble a constellation akin to the Corona Borealis created by Dionysus, who in some versions of the myth later weds Ariadne, by throwing Ariadne’s diadem into the sky - a cluster of stars formed by the star closest to us. The contingent process yielded this symbol of hope behind and beyond the intended tragic foreground.
Allowing light to tell a story, and bringing human culture into cosmic space, 'Ariadne' touches on the concept of creation, illustrating the mythological practice of humans inscribing their place amongst the stars."
To find out more about the Cosmoscope Exhibition, see the exhibition's webpage here.