Gossamer
2003 - 2024
Gossamer is a project I started in 2003 while at Parsons. I completely misunderstood the assignment in my experiments class, which was to bring in something other than a negative to print.
Rifiling through my bag, the only thing I found was a harinet that was holding some other photo gear. This seamed like a stretch, but at that point I didn't have anything to loose. I smashed the hairnet into the negative holder of my enlarger and exposed the paper through it. And thus Gossamer was born.
Without easy access to a darkroom, I eventually re-approached the project using a flatbed scanner instead. This had the notably different results illustrated below.
Using an enlarger, light simply passes straight through to the paper, blocked only by the harinet. On a scanner, I'm forced to leverage a background to get the detail of the hairnet. I really hadn't expected the shadow this produced. There's fun to be had with this new constraint, using different objects made from different materials and such, but I honestly prefer the crispness produced using an enlarger.
Shadows are produced when using a scanner.
Corrected in post, this is more similar to the original enlarger approach.
Gossamer Reboot
The 2024 Sessions
Fast forward to June 2024, I revived Gossamer for my first single page Risograph zine.
Unfortunately, due to the very detailed line work, the file wasn't something at all reasonable to print on Riso. I'd been creating trapping to get the colors to print each in its own vibrant glory, but lining up the layers to accomodate this quickly became a nightmare.
Children ran out of the room screaming.
I very much like the color play achieved with layering and hope to explore this further in the future. But for now, these pieces exist as documentation of the process.
👆 This guy ... impossible to print.
An earlier design which became what's above.