Liznojan includes landscapes, portraits, and compositions that suggest a narrative; inviting the viewer to create their own stories.

“’Liznojan’ means to learn whilst following a track. This is really about experiencing place and nature. I was never really a realist. I’d always take these walks and drift off, which I guess is what I still do now, just with a camera. It was these daydreams and finding another world within the one that presents itself that always fascinated me. I would always tell stories and get completely lost within my own imagination.”

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Kirsty Whiten has been working since 2000, exhibiting her distinctive drawings and paintings internationally. In collaboration with other artists and in street settings, Whiten has used paste-up techniques to enlarge her characters and work them into public murals.

She is known for her warped large-scale portrait paintings and highly detailed photo-realistic drawings, often containing powerfully subversive content and irreverent humour. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Juxtopoz and Hi-fructose, and art-blogs worldwide. Whiten’s work is about people; human behaviour, history, family, society, sexuality and culture.  Her take on her subjects is quirky and unsettling.

I built a house with my partner, Ben Seal, a couple of years ago. We moved out of Edinburgh and into a small village in Fife. We designed a passive house; that is one which requires little or no heating, and it has a sound studio for him and a painting studio for me. It’s by far the best studio I have ever had – in the past I was always in a semi-derelict building with mice and frost. I still can’t really believe it every time I walk in – I love it.  Because I got to design it from scratch, it has good north light and a skylight to the east for morning sun.

If I am painting I work at the easel and make a mess everywhere, other times I sit at a drawing board to work on paper and try to be precise. I have images and little bits of text all over the walls, and I find my brain makes good and odd connections out of these in it’s own time, when I am not concentrating too hard. I have to keep refreshing this pin-board to keep ideas flowing. I also have a few images of favourite artists around – Paula Rego, Charles Avery, Frida Kahlo, Dorethea Tanning – just to remind me where to aim I guess.

I bring people into the studio to photograph them and dress-up and play – it is essential to have this neutral, creative work space – everyone behaves differently in there, quieter, more focused and sort-of free.

I’m working on a set of rituals and rites just now – I have an exhibition in Austria in July and I have a lot of work to make – so I am collecting little fetish power objects and photographing and drawing different people in costume, dancing and freaking out.

From time to time I work outside because I can make my work public and monumental by enlarging the drawings into paste-ups. I really like the public aspect of it – it is the antithesis of the gallery where it all has to be clean and crisp and the feedback is very civilized. It is highly glamorous work, often balancing on commercial bins and chatting to various tramps and passersby in an alley like a wind tunnel.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Oil paintings by Dundee based painter, Michael Corr.

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An award winning artist, Cook works with lens-based media focusing on large format film and antique photographic practice; he is also an award-winning filmmaker, combining 8mm and 16mm film with digital technology to great effect. His work is mercurial, rooted in place and the intrinsic connections between people, land and sea. Cook is currently artist in residence for Absent Voices. He tells us more about his work.

YOU are an artist. I was told this on the day I walked into Glasgow School of Art for the first time and it still fills me with both joy and fear. I make as many films as I put photographs on gallery walls. When I make a film for someone, I’m of course billed as a filmmaker. When I make photographs, because of the nature of them (physical, often plates on glass or tin) I’m often described as an artist. You are what you are making, creatively speaking, it seems.

I trained as an architect and my memories of an architectural education at Glasgow School of Art are that it was highly competitive. What it also was though was open; we worked across the whole school, especially in the early years, working under tremendous and enthusiastic people like Tony Barbour, and spending as much time as I liked life drawing. As the world of architecture closed in after three years, I began to make films on 8mm and slowly my current world opened up. What has stayed with me is the history, being taught by Gavin Stamp and James Macaulay was an honour; I used to sneak friends to their lectures. This engendered a love of landscape, place, people, of psychogeography.

Held [made for Shane Balkowitsch’s ‘Mask Series’, to be exhibited in the USA in 2014]

Aimee Neville [Collodion Portrait Series]

Kirsty Louise Jones [Collodion Portrait Series]

Over the past three years, thanks to Katie Cooke and Carl Radford, I’ve been working in portraiture using wet plate collodion, an entirely chemical photographic process dating from 1851. It was the primary method of capturing images from the early 1850s until the 1880s. The process must be completed before the plate dries; this brings a certain intensity, offering the ability to produce mercurial and unique images. What drives me in portraiture is the person: sitting, talking, drinking tea with the other I am about to capture.

The process of wet plate collodion is a process with a limited timeframe and yet there is no shutter on the camera: I am exposing using my hand and counting out loud in elephants (seconds). If I got my fancy pants Canon 5D Mark 3 out and snapped away, we may be at a 60th of a second, under lights. Your heart beats, your mind races, but what do you really do in a 60th of a second? With collodion, I use my hand to hold open the lens to expose a plate that I have just prepared for, say, five seconds. Within that time you can think. You can hear your heart beat and you can feel – nervous, comfortable, happy. Is this really just a photograph? There is more of you in it…

Rowan Davies, fisherman, Dunbar [McArthur’s Store Series]

Mick McLoughlin, Welder, McArthur’s Store, Dunbar [McArthur’s Store Series]

Currently I have an exhibition called McArthur’s Store at Dunbar Town House. McArthur’s Store is a series of wet plate collodion tintype portraits of the fishermen who work from an historic creel store on the Old Harbour in the small Scottish fishing town of Dunbar. With the support of Dunbar Harbour Trust, I set up a traditional dark room within McArthur’s Store, a building dating from 1658, working with the men in their place of work for a total of six months over two years. This work is centred on people and place, exploring the issues surrounding our effect on our landscape and what imbues the very spirit of place. I decided to use this antique process to record these fishermen as collodion is sensitive at the violet end of the spectrum, delivering a clear visual depth, a suggestion that we are peering beneath the skin. These men have worked outside their whole lives, thrown around in all weathers and as such the collodion seems to accentuate their age, their chapped lined sunshine beaten skin. After beginning, I learned that the fishermen were bringing on the next generation, so in the second year of my residency I made portraits of the young boys, just recent school leavers but already experienced fishermen.

Compound [McArthur’s Store Series]

Arc [McArthur’s Store Series]

“Arresting and nostalgic, contemplative and intriguing…Cook’s portraits create their own atmosphere and intrigue. Rooted in place, they reflect its spirit, at once harsh and poetic; the tracings of light from a northern sky on raw metal.”
Giles Sutherland, The Times [4 Stars].

McArthur’s Store is currently exhibited at Dunbar Town House until 20 December 2013. A series of 16 framed fisherman’s portraits will be touring the United Kingdom during 2014 and Alastair will be publishing an accompanying book; four of these portraits form part of the Democratic Salon at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh, exhibited until Christmas. This series of work was funded through North Light Arts by Creative Scotland as part of Year of Creative Scotland 2012 and Year of Natural Scotland 2013.

Uma Rebecca Nada-Rajah [Collodion Portrait Series]

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Want to read more blogs by artists? Look here.

Tell us about yourself.

Since my teenage years my biggest passion was photography, combined with general interests in art, literature and history. I enrolled to study philosophy at University of Lodz in Poland however I quickly found out that it wasn’t this that I was looking for. In 2005 I came to London and after moving from place to place in and around the Big Smoke and having various – less or more interesting jobs I decided to move to Edinburgh. Not long after that I enrolled at Stevenson College to study Professional Photography, which I finished in 2012 with a degree in Bachelor of Arts. In September 2012 I moved to Aberdeen where I am continuing work on my portraiture and landscapes projects.

In “The Neighbours” project, I am trying to create a portrait of contemporary and multicultural Scottish society and investigating its links with the rest of the world. To highlight that migration, and multicultural societies are not a new occurrence, I am researching on communities and individuals who came to Scotland many years ago. But of course the main part of this project is about more recent changes. In the last ten years many people from new EU countries like myself settled down here which resulted in Scotland being even more diverse and multicultural. The main idea is included in the title – In today’s well connected world anyone regardless of nationality, cultural or religious background can be our neighbour.

“Sikh family” – Edinburgh, 2012 – The Neighbours

Where do you work?

For now, most of my work is done in Aberdeen and Edinburgh but the further stage of my project would require me to travel to different areas of Scotland.

When I am making portraits, I am always working in my sitters’ homes or places, which are related to their stories. I like that every person’s home has its own unique mood and story. I prefer to be out there that’s why I am very rarely working in the studio, but of course I have some ideas for studio-based projects as well. When it comes to landscapes, I am trying to combine my interest in places and scenes, which are aesthetically attractive to me with my interest in the history of the city, its inhabitants and their everyday activities.

“Jozefina” – Slovakia, 2013 – “Domov” – project recently shortlisted in The Jill Todd Photographic Award

Tell us about your process:

I choose to work in a genre of portraiture photography as this form gives me the possibility to meet a variety of different characters and listen to their stories, whilst observing them in their private domestic environment. I would describe my work as a formal environmental portraiture. My portraits are always a result of collaboration between the portrayed person and myself, however I always keep at a distance. I am the one who is recording their appearance and the story but in most cases I act more like a guide rather than a director. I am aware of the fact that photography – as any other medium – is very subjective but I want my sitters to be as truthful to themselves as possible. I want them to forget about the presence of the camera for a while. To achieve this I am always asking them to imagine that they are seeing a mirror instead of the camera. These mirrors are double-sided and I hope that the viewer looking at my portraits will be able to find himself in one of the pictures and translate the stories of my sitters to his own experiences. I think that these portraits also reflect who am I.

My landscapes are about juxtaposition, local history and mood of a particular place. My own perception of the place is also playing a very important role in the whole process of creating the photograph. I am often attracted by landscapes where mainly everything is designed by man or it is a result of mans’ activities as this can say a lot about the time and the conditions in which we were/are living.

“Polish- Russian family” – Aberdeen, 2013 – The Neighbours

What’s your typical day like?

This changes from time to time. When I am preparing for new projects, I tend to spend some time on looking for possible sitters, locations, funding sources and also on promoting ongoing projects that I am doing right now. But the research process is constant, as you never know what you may come across. When projects are in the implementation stage, I visit people or locations and take their portraits. I also work part-time in the evening so my photographic activities are from early morning until late afternoon. Very often I spend nights on the post production of the photographs from the past weeks. I try not to look at the new pictures immediately as I like to develop a sort of fresh view which allows me to look at them more objectively.

“Dr Kazimierz Durkacz” – Edinburgh, 2012 – The Neighbours

Where do you find inspiration?

This is a tricky question. If I knew where I could always find inspiration, I would not “waste” my time on looking everywhere I think I might find it!

It could be everything! From a short note in a local paper, word in the dictionary, book, story someone told me or most often by just walking around the city and being a bit nosey and curious about people and places.

What are your future plans?

At the moment I am taking part in “The Quality of everyday life” exhibition, which is on display in the Summerhall gallery until 22 November. I am showing some of my portraits from “The Neighbours” project there. Apart from continuing my work on this project, I am also working on a landscape series called “Gray City” and I am in the research stage for another portraiture project called “The Picts.” As my career progresses, I see myself working on collaborative projects with anthropologists and historians, combining social sciences with photographic art for the benefits of society. That’s my dream.

I would like to use this opportunity to encourage everyone who has foreign ancestors or those for whom Scotland is a new home to contact me, as I would love to hear your story and take a portrait of you or your family. I am looking forward to meeting you!

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So. I make here. It looks small when captured like this, almost cornered. My first admission is that I used this as an excuse to tidy the maelstrom driven mess it had become. An image of the Victorian terraced house I live in in Leith may be more appropriate as I inhabit the house with the full-time full-throttle artistic-endeavour that drives so many of us: the house is my place of work, not just this studio. I drift through the house, switching switches and drinking coffee, making cake and kneading bread, thinking. When I do sit in this space, it is with such focus and drive that the work comes fast. I edit, cut and write here. My films come to life here and settle here; still images taken on film or glass or tin come into focus here.

The wall behind us is a window to a Victorian cottage garden, sun dripped or rain drenched, it accepts the extremeness of Edinburgh’s weathers and refuses to stop propagating. The other wall is the wall of objects, it suffuses my influences. The opposite wall is blank, white, a nothing, a space to stare at.

So what can you see? All present and correct: a MBP, some Swedish furniture, a Super 8 camera. The intertwined glass and metal objects are from a residency I completed at North Lands Creative Glass in Lybster in May this year where I cast glass: this sea-worn wrapped-steel loop comes from the beach at Whaligoe in Caithness; I cast it in glass whole, the result the yellow and black piece on the left.

With regard to photography, I mostly don’t exhibit digital, I dance around the fringes of fine art photography, of analogue photography, of making images not taking them. Having said that, in Lybster I pursued my interest in Collodion wet plate photography, developing a kilned ambrotype process, which I will pursue further this year with the aid of a formative influence, Carl Radford. What I mean by kilned ambrotype is that we spent careful time preparing glass photographic plates using a Victorian technology and then I threw them into a kiln at 600 degrees. The results were astonishing, delicate and amber-bright.

My most recent exhibition of fine art photography, Analogue Decay, was shown at the Howden for a month over Easter; it is a collection of new analogue work, celebrating the disintegration and imperfections of this near obsolete process and the unique painterly images it can produce. The pieces are not digitally manipulated and were shown at full negative ratio. The best I can hope is that this is seen as honest work.

My room is now a midden again. I love it.

Currently, Alastair has a series of 12 short films in the Edinburgh Festival, as part of Kevin Williamson’s Robert Burns project, Not In My Name. The films intersperse with Kevin’s rote recital of Burns more radical, untagged poems. The second part of its run in the Edinburgh Fringe is from the 24th – 28th August 2011 at the National Library of Scotland, at 7pm each evening.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.