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Workshop and Artist Talk with Caroline Roberts

Saturday, April 1 | 2–5PM

Silver Street Studios at Sawyer Yards, East Gallery

2000 Edwards Street, Houston, TX 77007

Join artist Caroline Roberts for an artist talk and image making workshop in conjunction with the exhibition Contact: Making Images Using the Cyanotype Process. Focusing on the relationships between civilization and the natural world, Roberts uses a combination of historic alternative photographic techniques and musicological display tropes to instigate conversation about the human desire to classify and control nature. Roberts often utilizes materials gathered from nature to construct her cyanotype images, drawing from the landscapes near the sites wherein her works are exhibited. 

Following Roberts’s talk, guests are invited to use natural materials such as flowers, leaves, twigs, and flora collected in Houston to create unique cyanotype prints inspired by Caroline Roberts’s art practice. The workshop is free and open to the public, and all materials are provided. Guests are welcome to bring their own natural materials to use during the workshop.

If you are interested in creating a cyanotype image from an existing photograph, follow the Photoshop instructions in this video, and email your JPG file to info@fotofest.org with the subject line “Contact Negative.” FotoFest will print your negative on transparency paper at no charge.

Registration is not required but is encouraged. To register to attend, follow the link below.

About the Speaker

Caroline Roberts is a fine art photographer frustrated by our fencing off and general ignorance of the natural world. She is fascinated by our human attempts to classify, investigate, and understand as a way to preserve an illusion of control. Her photographic installations play on well-established knowledge systems, such as the herbarium, the museum display, the field guide, and the library. 

The chance encounter of a sunny afternoon and a pack of sun print paper introduced Roberts to photograms. She was immediately drawn to use this direct contact between a light-sensitive surface and the world to sample nature – collecting ghostly reminders of its presence. She prefers historic photographic processes for their inherent unpredictability. Harking back to the era of Victorian gentlewoman scientists, her artistic practice draws on chance and her spirit of inquiry as she manipulates and disrupts her processes and materials. 

Born in the United Kingdom, Roberts lives and works in Houston, Texas. Often found hiking in state and national parks, Roberts’ interest in landscape and the natural world is heightened by managing fifteen acres of wild, riparian forest in rural Texas.

www.carolinesroberts.com