On exhibit through May 14th at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica, the photography of Sal Taylor Kydd offers a stunning juxtaposition of innocence and change. Kydd’s exhibition, Origins, is all about the story of our past, rooted in the present moment. It is about growth, transformation, the basis for our memories and the magical alchemy that makes us, “us.”
The artist’s photographic process is one first developed in the 1800s by British photographer Henry Fox Talbot. While Kydd shoots with a digital camera, she makes a physical negative printed in a contact frame to create a salted paper print. Kydd says “There is a tangible connection with nature and the natural elements brought into the print, which mirrors the content of the work.” The artist notes that it takes a considerable amount of time to make a print, coating the paper, exposing it to the sun, and waiting for the development process. “The artistry of ‘making’ a photograph becomes itself an act of becoming and invention,” Kydd explains.
The effect is almost translucent, her black and white images glowing from within, kissed by sunlight, moonlight, and shadows. The approach fits her subject: connecting with nostalgia for the past, and the moment when change occurs. The luminous quality of her photographic process enhances the subject matter which is also aglow: the essence of childhood and its relation to our sense of place and time.
Kydd takes us up close and personal as we view the wonderous moment when childhood moves into the teen years – a girl, eyes closed, emerges from a pool of pristine water, or a small creature leaves it’s indelible mark – a delicate, tiny frog or braided snake held in a small, pale hand. Each moment is transcendent, caught in a careful prism. A droplet of water, a still lake, ferns floating beneath the surface of a small pond, a hand in a glass of water – mutable substances, as transitory as time, age, stillness. Often water is captured by the artist, and she makes her pools both mysterious and clear. Like Aphrodite rising from sea foam, her young women are water-born and bourne.
From a child in a joyful back-bend, to the fragile image of a jelly fish out of water, to strands of hair swaying mobile and fish-like in that water, these are small moments writ large. What do these fragments of memory, an image imprinted on a child’s mind, in a mother’s heart, mean? Both cumulatively and individually, these pieces suggest that each moment supports the words of Aristotle, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The connection between each small part of a day, a child’s summer adventures, individual memories, creates the web that is life itself.
And life is ultimately Kydd’s subject in each of her photographic collections, but particularly here. Origins also reflects on our own awareness of time and change. The title itself suggests that the exhibition is designed to show our own transformations internally as well as that of the external world around us, and our relationship to the natural world. Using as a frequent subject her own children, she views these relationships and transformations through their eyes.
Originally from the UK, Kydd traveled the world before selecting the Los Angeles area as her home. She splits her time between LA and Maine, where the artist is pursuing an MFA in photography. However, the sense of place she crafts is less about the state in which it takes place than the subject’s state of mind.
Kydd says “In the 1970s children led relatively unfettered lives and were free to explore the world with a large degree of independence. In my work photographing my children and family, I find myself revisiting that time through their experience. Each year we spend our summers on a small island off the coast of Maine…a place for us to connect with nature and with each other.”
This island setting, and all of Kydd’s work, are strongly poetic. And it’s not merely coincidence that her images have the feel of visual poetry – haiku of the highest order – she’s also written and published a book of poetry and photographs, Just When I Thought I Had You.
To feel the cadence of Kydd’s work, visit Gallery 169, located at 169 W. Channel Rd, Santa Monica, CA 90402
- Genie Davis; Photos: courtesy artist Sal Taylor Kydd, Kristine Schomaker