Since the exhibition came down I’ve been experimenting with the idea of Witness Marks beyond my father in-law’s house. I’ve been guilty of perhaps stretching the concept but in a playful way. I’m intrigued to see how the project can develop beyond the scope of a one person one space context.

My time away in Australia since the end of the exhibition was a good time to play around in a new unfamiliar context and it feels like there is some value in this.

I keep coming back to the aerial shot of the quarry I made in Umbria in the summer. It feels like there is more to explore here too.

I’m in the process of fulfilling the 14 book orders I received and have made a drop card to ship with them when they go. They feature the blurb text that accompanied the books when they were on display at the gallery, text which wasn’t ready at the time of going to print.

In keeping with my original intention to foster out the boards to people and to leave them outside to weather, something that I haven’t done given the eventual expense of my prints, I did leave a test print outside.

The torrential rain that the UK had while I was away made short work of it, so I’m glad that hasn’t stymied my plans for the group exhibition in March. The supporting essay is almost complete and due for submission tomorrow.

I’d committed early on to opening the show for a number of days and had decided to invigilate myself. This would give me time in the space, to catch up on this blog and to begin work on the supporting document.

After the opening night the show was relatively quiet. Quite a few invitees who hadn’t been able to make it to the opening came in over the four day run. I had a consistent blocks of time where I was showing people around and talking through the work in a more detailed way than I’d been able to during the opening itself.

I took time to experiment with different audio in the space, streaming different pieces of music that I’ve heard played in my father in law’s house, and the audio tracks from the motion stills that I’d made as part of the project.

It also gave me a chance to watch the light change as the sun moved across the sky, and the way the gallery lighting became firstly less and then more visible as the sky lightened and darkened.

The gallery seemed warmer and more inviting, and the work stronger when the sun was lower in the sky and the lighting was more visible. Playing music added atmosphere without overpowering or confusing the ambiance, where as the audio from the motion stills definitely felt more intrusive.

I was intrigued to note that people invariably went to the paperback book. I had them lined up, paperback, blurb, portfolio, for the first two days of the show, and for the opening, and people instinctively picked up the paperback and looked through.

On day three of the show I switched them around, offering up the hardback first, then blurb, then paperback, and people still went straight to the paperback.

The prints needed to be adjusted regularly as the conditions changed in the space, the expanded and contracted as day went on, so it was necessary to either tighten or relieve the tension in the paper a few times over the course of the day.

After nearly tearing my fingernails out more than once I discovered this super handy pin-relocation tool. the concave side lifted the pins out nicely while the convex side prevented scratching the paper.

The weather had an impact on footfall, so when it was raining I focused on updating the blog and preparing to write the supporting document. It also gave me time to photograph, video, and lidar map the space.

Day One

I took possession of the gallery space on the Thursday morning, rain had trapped the prints in the car overnight and it meant that I couldn’t load the boards first thing. I met Adam, the studio’s co-founder for coffee and we unloaded the prints and went back to get the boards.

Once we were in the space it was clear that the central partition had been moved for another exhibition. I was concerned that the flow of the space would be different, and that people would be able to see too much from a single vantage point. We moved the central section back to where it had been when we measured the space.

Opening the prints was a revelation. They were glorious. Any worries I had about taking the 45mp images up to 1200mm evaporated. They were rich, detailed, saturated and looked exactly as I hoped they would, better in fact.

We began stapling, using a sanding block (in a sock to prevent scratching the paper), as a guide to keep the distance between the staples even. We started in the top left corner and smoothing as we went. I was tentative because the prints were pinching and pulling immediately, and getting a tidy line of staples was difficult as it was hard to gauge where the staples were coming out.

Having made the borders roughly proportionate to the print size, some of them were small and it was hard to place the staples evenly.

We continued stapling, the video team arrived to get some shots of us putting the exhibition together, and so we started to hang the images.

We went for some lunch, all of a sudden it was 2pm and things weren’t going to plan.

By the time we came back the prints had all begun to expand. Even the ones that had looked okay before we’d gone for lunch were looking naff, and Clocks looked horrendous.

It was clear I was going to have to do some reprinting, but before I ordered the prints we needed a solution, the important thing was to stop and acknowledge the gut feeling I’d had since we started, that the stapling wasn’t working. We had seven prints stapled, it was time to find a solution.

The tests I’d done with the stapler had been minimal – to confirm that they held the paper, that the staples would pierce the plywood and not come through the back. The paper I was testing with was at room temperature, and had been for some time, it had also been left flat in my studio.

As such it did not really match the cold, possibly slightly damp prints that were much bigger and had spent the night in the car. It was also blank, and was not saturated with ink.

I wanted to use the plywood boards, partly because I’d bought them. The replacement prints were going to cost £180, and not using the ply would have added a further £160 of wastage to the project.

We stapled sofa to a board, but with only two staples, top left and top right, and then screwed the board to the wall. We still screwed through the print, but the effect was immediately superior to everything we’d tried thus far.

The board pushed the photograph in the space, and gave them more impact, the clean lines around the photographs made it easier to look at the photograph without the mounting overcrowding or pulling attention away from the photograph.

The space is made up of two railway arches, one in front of the other, the rear of the arch is bricked up, and the front is a wall of glass. The roof in the rear section is unsealed brick and water seeps through at a rate congruent with recent rainfall. The sun (and the interior heaters) raise the temperature making for constantly changing conditions.

The paper’s need to expand and contract with the changing conditions was something that I was going to have to be able to adjust as exhibition went on. Moving back to drawing pins would give me the flexibility to adjust the prints as the exhibition went on, would be in keeping with my original theme of the temporary, and could be accomplished in the time we had left.

We set about mounting the boards in situ, ordered the replacement prints, and left for the night.

Day Two

The second day of the hang went infinitely better. A trip to the printers to pick up the replacement prints, a trip to the wine merchants to collect the wine for the evening event, I arrived early and started fettling the place, clearing spaces and trying to get closer to a show space. I prepped the bar and when Adam arrived we started pinning the prints up.

We made quick progress, choosing to use some old brass drawing pins that we had ‘borrowed’. Some had a pleasant patina born of age, and the prints looked infinitely better. Using the brass pins with the wide heads meant that any holes made or extended by re-pinning would be hidden by the head. Hiding the screws behind the print reduced clutter, the prints looked awesome.

Once we had the prints up we sorted the lighting, moving them so that the light would fall on the right part of the paper, we jerry-rigged a light for the books, and Adam managed to wall mount the two prints that I had assumed I would have to leave on the floor. (The left hand side of the gallery as you walk in isn’t technically gallery space, but we hung the work using the screw holes that existed already.

I shot this video once the pictures were hung and the lights were sorted, but before I’d put the finishing touches to the space. Once the space was sorted I went home to change. around 40 minutes before the opening I went back into the space and re-pinned the prints that were sagging or ballooning before going to the pub up the road to wait anxiously for the opening.

A recent visit to the printers for the final sign-off did not initially go well. They were struggling to get the quality that they’d been able to achieve earlier in the year.

I’d gone over to their premises feeling paranoid that I wasn’t going to get as much detail as I wanted in the shadows after viewing the finished books from Blurb with some consternation. The test images they showed me were showing significant speckling and a distinct lack of detail.

As the team had had another paper stock on the printer they’d done a test batch on that paper too. This was a decent mid-range photo paper, as opposed to the blue-back I’d been planning to use.

The pictures looked beautiful. The detail, the contrast, the colour depth, I was entranced…

Even in the snapshot below you can see the difference – I was struck by how my deeper and nicer the colours were, and the greater detail to the extent that I was left in a quandary.

I brought the paper home and ran a test on it, trying to paste it my test plywood. It would not take the paste, and kept curling back at the edge. I was now having freaking out more than a little.

That morning I’d been over to Stourport where I could get the plywood cut to size for the exhibition.

Realising what a challenge it was going to be to get the pasted pictures onto the boards I’d done a few tests pasting the board and putting the dry blue-back paper onto the board, with little success.

(The pictures were on the board, but they were damp, wrinkly, and in no way suitable to for an exhibition.)

I was suddenly aware of how challenging it was to mount wet prints on plywood, and then to do so and not get paste on the front, this had thus far been a problem for next month, or next week. It was now a problem for now and I was starting to panic…

I now had a boot full of plywood, enough wallpaper paste to redo my entire house and a choice of good prints that wouldn’t stick, or ugly ones that would.

Going back on Blue-back

The fly-posting idea has been really useful. Knowing how I would mount the images has meant that I haven’t had to worry about mounting them for the last few months, and that has left me free to make decisions about other things.

It is however time to acknowledge that as an idea it has proved costly. In terms of envisaged stress when it comes to mounting the images, and mostly in terms of image quality. The paper lends itself well to big bold graphics, but isn’t particularly good for photographs, and this is a photography exhibition. It wasn’t until I saw the images reproduced on photo paper that I realised how much image quality I was sacrificing.

For much of the last few notes the idea of wallpaper pasting the images has been a problem for later on, for further down the track. Over the last week, the test mounts have proved challenging. keeping the prints clear of paste and unwrinkled has been difficult but I’ve persisted because the actual paste-up was still a week away.

The fly-posting idea was essentially a way to do a lot of big prints cheaply, it meant that I could fill the gallery space in a deliberate way that paid homage to the space that I was infiltrating. They were to be a temporary witness mark, made on the surface of the gallery.

There are other ways to do this, that still nod in the direction of the temporary pop-up, with out the stress, mess and possible difficulties of fly-posting. I had originally considered bulldog clips, but Tony convinced me that this would look cheap and naff, (shit I think was the term). It also doesn’t reference the space particularly.

I’ve made the late term decision to staple the images up. Stapling gets used for missing pet posters, for notice boards, and for other temporary posters all the time. There is no way to remove the posters without ripping them, the sit outside much as fly-posted graphics do and they weather as these posters do too.

This provides me with a clean, quick way to mount these pictures to the plywood, embodies the temporary nature of the work and the exhibition and enables me to use the better paper and thus keep the improved image quality.

By the time the exhibition is over it will have cost me around £1800. I’m inviting friends, family and clients to this event, as well as the public. This is an opportunity to marry two sides of my practice together, the considered and hopefully artful approach to the creation of work, and my more commercial work, (which is artful, but perhaps in a different way). The fact that I’m presenting this work to a group who either already do, or might use me commercially in the future, makes me want to extract as much value from that investment as possible.

In short, I don’t want people to be wondering why the work doesn’t look it’s best, or worse to find myself explaining the reasons for my mounting decisions over the run of the exhibition. I don’t want people to look at the work and think that it is bad for a reason that they don’t understand.

I’m glad I had the fly-posting idea to use as a lynch pin throughout my prep for this exhibition. knowing what I would do later helped me form ideas in other areas without having to worry about print cost and space and framing and so forth.

It isn’t the best way to showcase this work.

Hopefully the use of the staple-mounting will be a valid way to do both, present the work in an apt and high quality way, and pay homage to the space in which it is exhibited.

(The images above includes portions of the Distracted Boyfriend image created by Antonio Guillem in 2015. This was a stock image that then went viral as a meme. It is used here without permission, in the context in which it became famous.)

Last week my friend Jack who works as a press officer and got together to draft a press release. On Friday I met Adam Best from the Artery to take a press shot (using wifi remote).

The release is going to local media today in the hope of driving interest in the project and generating some footfall for the gallery show.

The release is as follows:

A thought-provoking new art exhibition is opening in Worcester. 

Witness Marks, an exhibition by Worcester-based professional photographer James Greenoff-Cairns, is running at the city’s Artery Studios gallery next week.

James said: “I’m incredibly excited to open Witness Marks at Artery. It’s a collection that tells a story of the spaces we create, collections we build, and marks we make that I hope people will find a real conversation starter.” 

After a decade working nationwide from his base in the faithful city, Witness Marks is James’s first artistic exhibition.

“This is a project that began as a personal labour of love but it quickly became clear that the themes are universal, they speak to all of us, and they are something everyone can engage with – and so it became this exhibition.” 

Adam Best, Artery Studios co-founder, added: “We’re really excited to show James’ photographs on our walls for his upcoming exhibition at The Artery. James is yet another example of the incredible creative talent our city has to offer and we’re pleased to be supporting local artists in our safe, Inclusive & affordable art spaces.”

The carefully curated collection accompanies a special Witness Marks website and book in portfolio and paperback editions. 

You can see Witness Marks at Artery, in Arches 28 and 29 on Croft Street, Worcester, from Saturday until Tuesday (Dec 9-12), from 10am to 4pm. Free Entry

For more information on the exhibition as well as the wider Witness Marks project, see www.witnessmarks.photo, for more information about the The Artery Studios , see www.thearterystudios.co.uk/

Addendum 06/12/23

The press release has been picked up by both the print and online editions of the Worcester News, and has proved to be one of my more successful instagram posts.

We’ll see if other media picks up on it over the next few days –