Ella Barnes is a collaborator with light - she captures ethereal forms of deep truth through an experimental process that involves cyanotype image-making. I sat down to talk with her about her work and here’s what happened.

I asked Ella how she began working with cyanotype and her relationship with the art of photography. She first started working in a dark room in high school and became captivated with the tactile magic of capturing an image and being able to hold it in the physical realm. This experience set the course of wanting to study photography at New York University, but not long after, the advent of social media transformed the art of picture taking into a social commodity. A portrait became less about the relationship between the photographer, the subject, and the visual exploration of a moment of identity, and instead became an visual asset for representation on an online profile. This was the launchpad for an inquiry into capturing something deeper.

The lineage of her process evolved from photographing literal subjects, to creating images that represented women’s inner worlds through still-life, and finally to abandoning the camera apparatus entirely. Barnes returned to manually creating images through drawing and painting. However, the preciousness of painting materials and well-known anxiety of being met with a blank canvas began to present challenges that Barnes combatted with playful experimentation- cyanotype.

Cyanotype is a method of using photo-sensitive chemicals on a surface, usually paper or fabric, and using the negative space of whatever is placed on a surface to summon an image. If you place a flower on a piece of treated paper and you set them out in the sun, everywhere that is exposed to light will sink into a deep blue, while the outline and interior of the flower remain the color of the original substrate. Speaking from experience, this method of creating is very generous in its imaginative and playful qualities. Cyanotype immediately brings you into conversation with the three dimensionality of our world, the moment to moment changing conditions of the sun and sky, and demands a kind of diligent presence. This, in combination with surprise, experimentation, and beauty is a delicious and exquisite combination for creation.

Once the camera was out of the picture, the possibilities really began to unfurl for Barnes. She began experimenting with sculptural negatives when she realized that any beam of light could be a partner in creating a cyanotype, and every shadow holds a secret in its source. She started to create three-dimensional objects that, when cast in light, would develop compelling shadow shapes. This was where the magic really started to kick off. Ella embraced a process that was in collaboration with a light, setting up a condition to capture a sun beam rather than operating with a surface and interacting with controls like paint or pigment. In this way, Ella is in a dance, placing her sculptures in contexts where the sun seemingly moves around the creative moment. By placing herself and creations in the world, which inherently is full of change, playfulness,and mischief, the images that were captured became imprinted with that energy.

“We don’t need to run from our shadows - we can transform them into light.”

The ceremony of presence that Ella is practicing centers the immediacy of sitting with available light and how the relationship between a physical object and the available light interact to create an output which is a shadow. Shadows exist as a full form in space that only becomes visible when it falls on something. The work is a moment in three dimensional space that is collapsed into a 2D plane.This piqued my interest because it begins to get to the core of what I find exciting about Ella’s work. To stand in the shadow of a tall tree is to feel the cool air on your skin. Protected from the heat that is vibrating the molecules of the air we are swimming in. We find refuge and our body recognizes shadow as a state of being, not simply a darker value in a flat picture. When asked about the conceptual role of shadows in her work, things got so juicy.

Barnes describes shadow as an invisible form, a body unseen, and cyanotypes allow you to take its fingerprint. How do we visualize the invisible? How do we peak into hidden realms? What does the skeleton of the 3D form that shines through show us about what is really there, what is underneath? What information are we not privy to? This is also where the color marries to the work so beautifully because blue lends itself to depth and abyss, like the way the sky falls away from itself, or the seemingly bottomless distances that reach into the ocean.

Now, come with me. You’re seven years old and you’re at summer camp, it's nighttime, the crickets are chirping, the counselors pin a white sheet to the wall and set up a flashlight. Before you know it, animals clumsily bounce in front of you. It's rudimentary, and it's magical. You look back from the outline of the bunny to see fingers woven together and try to wrap your mind around how two hands can transform into an animal in real time.

Artwork by Ella Barnes. Courtesy of Ella Barnes

That’s part of what Ella is creating; messy, weird towers of materials that leave behind an elegant and ethereal shape. One whose origins are surprising and strange. Shadows are an embodiment of the void, the temptation of the abyss. As humans, we are so lustful for mystery, and shadows generously lend themselves to fantasy and the unknown. There is a transmutation that happens as Ella turns shadow into light; the cyanotype alchemizes shadow into a body of birghtness. Barnes has found a way to take something that feels like a void and turns it into a beacon.

The origin of these images that have essences of peaceful perfection is surprising and complex. It's the woven fingers behind the shadow puppet. In this way, Barnes speaks to how we are inextricably linked to our dark and messy sides, of which we are all composed. She asks, how can we integrate our shadows, to be alive, self-aware and whole? We don’t need to run from our shadows, but can transform them into light. Not only are they not hidden away, but they are the main event.

There are countless sacred texts that try to capture elaborate and inexplicable experiences. Barnes speaks of being captivated by the ways in which people have inexhaustibly tried to communicate moments of enlightenment, specifically the visual experience captured in words. In studying them, she described being filled with the ‘frenetic energy’ of a deep knowing and recognition of the infinite. It is not something easily described, but is something readily felt and where I feel like visual language can step in and more efficiently bestow an image that brings us to a place of comprehension and recognition. The “floaty, beautiful weightlessness” of the energy that is spoken about in spiritual explorations can be spoken to in imagery. She says she feels like her process is “a combination of sifting for gold and running weird experiments” and every so often, is able to retrieve these magical morsels from the other side. A physical manifestation that becomes present in this realm that is a shadow from the other realm. The mission of this lifetime in Ella’s words is to cross over to the other side and return with artifacts to share with our world.

Everything we excavate from the other side helps show us that we need to continue to move into alignment with the burgeoning values of the coming times. Barnes specifically noted that she believes we are moving away from a time based economy towards a perspective based economy, in which artists will help guide us through to a future through imagination. She believes we will benefit from abandoning the hard and fast boundaries around science that elevate it as the one true means for objective reality, and instead we’ll hopefully begin interweaving knowledge from magic and spirituality. We are simply in the midst of experiencing the limits of valuing some forms of knowledge over others. Let us not cut off the facets of the various ways in which we understand the universe. Barnes shares that artists are a step ahead because we trust our imagination to be a safe and beautiful space that helps us to explore possibilities. In this way, I continue to find similarities between creatives and scientists on the cutting edge of all subjects that require thinking in an abstract way, beyond the lines of what we feel is concrete and true. Artists know how to lean into the unknown and see what comes out, ideally without judgement and sharing that with those who may not feel that they have access to that kind of liquid ambiguity of knowledge and thought.

We can accept science as fact, as much as we can accept the presence of shadows. They don’t lie, they are the direct result of the penumbra before it. The true finger print of a thing exists in a finite and unapologetic way, like a fossil. We recognize it and we know it when we see it. The shadow is the acceptance of an unsightly underbelly and a beautiful surface being one in the same. There is a requirement for holding multiple truths in this world and this is part of the thinking that can and is leading us into the future. The integration of that dichotomy is not only the wisdom of so many spiritual traditions, but also the key to giving ourselves permission to be messy, because it is, in Ella’s words, our birthright. And, it is a gift to be able to share it all, every facet of our grotesque and beautiful selves. Ella’s shadows show us that the truth of darkness is far more interesting, honest, and valuable than any superficial and one-dimensional beauty we sometimes elevate. In a time of flattening ourselves to show glory and ease on the internet, we are reminded that if we long to be seen and known, we can tenderly look at our shadows and not be afraid of the dark.

See more of Ella’s work on Instagram.

Article by Emma Hines

Based in Oakland, California, Emma Hines is a writer and painter interested in the intersection of the arts, science, and spirituality. She is building a web of conversation with artists, philosophers, and scientists who are bridging modalities for knowledge in a way that uplifts mystery and magic while also being invigorated and grounded by science. The knowledge we gain from rigorous scientific testing adds a layer of understanding to the knowledge we experience through lived experience, intuition, and alchemization through art, all of which are important for illuminating the multiple complex facets of the universe.

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