Drawing on the mood of Miles Davis’ iconic 1959 album and a certain register of blue, Juilee Pryor’s cyanotypes of lingerie work a scene of intimacy and nostalgia. ‘Kind of Blue’, they also carry the erotic charge of a blue joke as their delicate outlines of transparent flimsiness and lace trace the edges of contact with the fantasized flesh of imagined bodies.

Cyanotypes’, in themselves, are an extraordinary medium- always that same blue, registering fluctuations of intensity proportional to the material passage of the light. An old invention, one could say, which pre-exists the development of modernity’s film (let alone our contemporary digital processes), the cyanotype directly mediates between image and light. There’s no camera – just a painted on layer of photosensitive blue responding to the degree of transparency or opacity of the object placed upon it. Literally the object is in direct contact with the screen, a direct caress, as direct as that of a body’s imprint left on a lover’s sheets. As such, the cyanotype short-circuits the distance set up by photographic representation, and its use reflects a determined and knowing departure from Pryor’s preferred medium of the mystery of infra-red photography (often capturing what’s unseen to the naked eye). Pryor was never one for straightforwardly shooting what is seen through the lens; her infrareds have a tendency to transform ordinary everyday daylight streets, and even tubs of garden shrubs, into quasi-mystical experiences of brooding shadows and strange luminescence.

Therefore given Pryor’s proven understanding of material processes, there’s logic to her choice of the cyanotype as a medium appropriate to an expression of intimacy. The cyanotype’s imprint literally traces the very contours of any object placed upon it in a ratio of direct proportion. There’s no near and far; only the closeness of the touch of the thing itself recorded in the degree of its transparency to light. Pryor layers the phenomenology of experience – what Merleau-Ponty called the ‘carnal eye’, the eye which feels what it sees – by combining the appeal of the tactile and visual. We all have memories of diaphanous stuff of the erotic encounter (or have fantasized about it) and the cyanotypes directly transfer that experience in its bodily imprints of delicate wisps of semi-transparent confections.

Other notable contemporary artists like Anne Ferran, Sue Pedley and Jin Nu have worked with transparency and opacity to different ends. Photographer Anne Ferran shot colonial history as transparencies of fine muslin garments in order to conjure the spectral presences of those who had once inhabited them; Jin Nu employs a similar technique to produce images of transparent ghost-garments of China’s baby girls lost to infanticide or western adoption. Installation artist Sue Pedley used cyanotypes to record the imprint of everyday bamboo objects in a residency in Asia: a kind of litmus test of flimsiness and resilience in this remarkable and ubiquitous material. Like Pryor they aimed to get beyond the mere photo, to paradoxically combine image with the thing’s material imprint.

In Kind of Blue, Pryor has shifted register from the mystical to the body, even if, in a certain way, it’s an absent body, or the memory of a body which is addressed. Thus there’s an intimate proximity combined with nostalgia for the body that’s no longer there. Ironically, there’s a certain kind of collapse, in which to pick up an item of lingerie and lay it out on a bed becomes similar to looking at photographs: an act of activating memory or fantasy. This nostalgic, fantasized or fetishized aspect is coloured, of course, by that kind of blue, the way music, a particular refrain, works its magic of associative hue.

This tone or this hue lingers like longing – or a womanly nostalgia for times and bodies past, evocative even, of the taboo topic of menopause and loss of the fertility that blossomed in a younger woman’s body. Yet, there is nothing like Wang Zhiyuan’s giant plastic underpants in this show, no engagement with aging, nothing gross or abject, and yet, via the metonymical trajectory set up by reference to Davis’ 1959 Kind of Blue a bitter-sweet strand of melancholy persists.

Ann Finegan
2010