“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths,” wrote Rebecca Solnit. “We love to see any part of the earth tinged blue…the celestial color,” mused Henry David Thoreau. And Maggie Nelson, whilst recalling the wide open view of an ultramarine ocean before her, wrote: “That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it.” To all of these people, as to many of us poetically-inclined, blue is unfathomably precious.
Then, of course, there’s Goethe, who said that rather than coming towards us, blue draws us after it, into the distance. And it’s this particular idea of distance—as something spiritual and cerulean-hued, wrapped up with the experience of a longing for both the natural world and beyond—that American artist Janelle Lynch has come to know and appreciate deeply.
This week, Lynch opens Endless Forms Most Beautiful at Flowers Gallery London, an exhibition of beautiful, elegiac cyanotypes depicting elements of nature as well as impressions of the artist’s own body, alongside three large-format black and white photographs of ephemeral matter such as spiders webs and dew drops. The work on view comes from a series she began producing while on a six-week solo odyssey in Amagansett, New York, on the Atlantic Ocean, in September 2022. Staying in a little house between the sea and a nature reserve, Lynch found herself immersed in solitude and in absolute communion with nature there, and she allowed her working process to intensify and metamorphose as a result.
“My process has always been intuitive—I don’t plan what I want to make—but in Amagansett, it became even more so. For the start of each day, I would have my film holders loaded with both black and white and color film, and I would have cyanotype paper coated and dried. What I did and where I went was guided by instinct,” she recalls. “With no one around, and only a bicycle for transportation to the town a couple of miles away, I was completely free to be extremely inward, to talk to myself, to talk to the trees, to cry, to stack a pile of bird remains on the dining table, to work with my naked body in the dunes—to be naked in the deepest and broadest sense of the word.”
Lynch began to collect organic remains and natural elements as she rambled the landscape—“an osprey wing, driftwood, sea plants.” She then started making cyanotypes with them, compelled to create physical, alchemical recordings in order to “affirm the fundamental value of life in all of its manifestations.” Later, she began to cyanotype her own body too, merging human presence with natural essence. “By that time, my connection to nature had reached new depths, and with my flesh pressed against botanicals and bird remains for the hour-long exposures, I experienced a union that I had not known before,” she describes. “With that came an astonishing sense of oneness and deeply felt associations to the primordial and the afterlife.”
The artist was first drawn towards the blue of cyanotypes because it allowed her to explore her “deep kinship with nature” in a new way—more directly than ever before. “Formally, the color blue suggests the faraway…and with cyanotypes I could create depictions of the spiritual realm to which I had a growing need to connect with,” she explains. “So it’s about the color, but also the hands-on and hand-made aspect of the medium that appeals to me and satisfies my need for a fuller experience of authorship: the mixing of the chemistry; the hand-coating process with a brush; the 20 minute baths.”
Endless Forms Most Beautiful borrows its title from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, because while his theories are rooted in the material world, Lynch says, “his words also allude to what may exist beyond it, including the afterlife.” For the past five years, she has been finding herself more and more drawn towards a spiritualist sort of photography, an interest that began in the Summer of 2018.
“I was working with clay at the time, and a thriving mulberry tree was pruned in the courtyard behind the sculpture studio,” Lynch recalls. “I took the tree limbs that were unceremoniously severed, covered them in paper and made an imprint of them with charcoal and Conté crayon. I was interested in making a record of their life as a way of honoring them, and in seeing if the paper could hold their energetic essence.”
Then the following year, she took the ashes of her beloved dogs, who had recently passed away, into the darkroom, and created photograms with them alongside plant matter from the home in which they’d lived. “These were direct translations of the objects’ touch and presence made with my touch and presence. I was curious about this other photographic language, liberated from the restraints of representational realism inherent in a camera-made image,” she muses.
“The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of the melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel,” wrote Solnit. These words seem hauntingly apt while spending time with Lynch’s work. From ideas of spirits and the extra-sensory realm to questions of existence and what may lie beyond, her images crystallize an ethereal atmosphere within their depths and somehow, the hum of nature that surrounded her while making them still swells from them now. The work is quietly powerful but not silent.
When asked why photography is such a compelling tool with which to visualize ineffable phenomena, Lynch says: “It comes down to the quality of presence that is invested in the act of creation—the deep care, need, and belief in the possibility of the transmission of the spiritual through the image-making process, and that is where this all began—with the question about whether that is possible. And I have found that it is.”
Editor’s note: Endless Forms Most Beautiful is on view at Flowers Gallery London between 8 June and 1 July 2023.
