Now that i have all my photographs taken i am starting to think about how i want to display them as i final piece. Something which i thought was really interesting was how much my photographs were about process which i explored with organic architecture and photographing the adding of each element. As this became the whole point of my photographs, the photographs becoming more and more simply a recording of the dens existence i wanted to consider ways of displaying my work which revolved around keeping this tactile nature to my photographs. I therefore decided to look at an emerging photographer called Felicity Hammond who displays her work in a really interesting way.

Hammond creates her photographs as sculptures which she displays within a space. Her work explores construction sites and places of ruin and destruction.

“I spend around a year photographing the same site and documenting its development over that time. There is a Baroque feel to the landscapes I choose, and they become shrouded with tarpaulin that looks incredibly sculptural – just like dressed objects in classical paintings. There’s theatre in these building sites, especially when they are lit at night.”

Her photographs once taken can then be printed onto acrylic sheets which can be manipulated into sculptural objects. She uses advanced photographic technologies such as CGI to print her photographs. The first time Hammond experimented with printing directly onto acrylic was in her project “You Will Enter An Oasis”. Previous to this she did  a residency at Bow Arts where she made cyanotypes, which are really early print processes of making photographs. UV light is used to expose an image.This project really led her into realizing her love for the changing nature of a place into destruction and her love for blue prints and exploring the process of change. This is also where the inspiration for so much of the blue used in her work comes from, Hammond remembering as a child being obsessed with her father’s engineering manuals and drawings. She likes the idea of her work revolving around the concept ‘restore to factory settings’. I think i want to mainly take inspiration from her work in considering how it creates a more immersive viewing of the photographs to be surrounded by the images. I want to try and re-create the experience of being surrounded by the dens and therefore evoke more of the childlike wonder of the experience. I want the experiences of the photographs to go beyond the photographs as in to have more of a connection with the process of building dens.

“This was my first material investigation into working with printing directly to acrylic. I wanted to allow the imagery used on rendered images to manifest itself into the physical world.”

Considering her work has given me an idea of how i am going to display my images in another form of presentation other than a book. I am considering now also making an instillation of a den inside a studio. The whole idea being to create a mass of material which hangs from the ceiling in a den like shape and to then project the photographs of my different dens onto this generic mass of a den. The sheets to create this den will be white to allow the details of the photographs to be as clear as possible and i will light the room to be very dark with only the den with the photographs projecting onto it illuminated. I can then photograph this process to create another set of images which show the process of creating a more tactile way of viewing my images. I think the whole concept behind this comes back again to how all the dens merge into one long childhood game. How each game played in each den leads onto the other and in building each den as children we learn tips and tricks which we carry on into our next den. The instillation will show this by having all these different dens printed onto the same generic shape of a den.  This is similar to Hammond’s work as the photographs are printed onto a material which is then sculpted into a different shape but i am simply projecting the images rather then having it literally printed onto the material.