Project statement
A palette is a range of colours. It can be an object that is used to house colours, and a surface to mix colours. It is a resource, a tool, a beholder of alteration and a facilitator for creation.
In computer graphics, a palette is referred to as the set of available colours of which an image can be made. With colour profiles available on our software, our colour perception can relate to how we view on our screens. With commitment to the device, screens can infuse the way we perceive, and in return, redesign our visual understanding of it. With analogue film apps you can choose your film without buying it, choose an era, and recreate an old memory. On Snapseed, you can auto remove the background of a subject and replace it with ‘a better’ one, or with One Tap Beauty Make-up Editor you can perfectly face-tune your selfie. Modify your body with Youcam, and airbrush imperfection…
Tools are companions.
Thinning, smoothing, enhancing and reducing are all tied in with ways images are altered through ‘retouching’. From representations of events, bodies and products to food and location; our ever-changing tools provide us with access to morph realities.
Gesturing towards the plasticity of the medium, Working Palette is an ode to the craft of hand retouching, and the work of ‘maestro’ retoucher and teacher Kevin O’Neill.
Hand printed as black and white photographs and hand retouched; a range of colour blending techniques, brushwork and physical retouch masks have been used to make this work. Focusing on the interaction between hand and image, subjects involved are retouching products once readily available on the market, and the borrowed palettes of Kevin O’Neill.
Building up colour and working on these prints with photographic dye, the objects themselves become responsive, living. Seeping in and out of the frame, areas are left unfinished, and others, embellished.
__________
Biography
Katrina Stamatopoulos is an artist based in London. Her research fixates on questioning the representation of photography, and it’s meaning as object and collective form. She is interested in consumption, and making connections between food and images; their digestion and representation, source and distribution, and entwining as daily process.
Katrina’s work manifests through her making process, whether it’s utilising found or expired paper stocks, experimenting in the darkroom, facilitating chemigrams, or creating pinhole cameras (and placing them covertly in public). Found material is often her starting point, and can range from objects, X-rays, 16mm film, food waste and packaging, to discarded photographic materials and negatives found at commercial labs in London.
Along with her practice-based research, Katrina is a Project Manager of the London Alternative Photography Collective, and Co-Founder of the Project Space Equivalentbehaviour, in North London.
Group exhibitions include: Built Photography, Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne (Upcoming, 2024) Symbiosis, A Hundred Years Gallery, London (2024) On Food, Conviviality and Cultures, Millepiani, Rome (2023) Transmutation, The Margate School, Margate (2023) Un/Sense, Christie’s, London (2022) MFA Graduate Show, Goldsmiths, London, (2020) and SURGE, the Courtauld East Wing Biennial, Somerset House, London (2019). Solo Exhibitions include Preying for Modesty (Meatheads), PhotoAccess, Canberra, Australia (2021).
