"Suspended In Time"
Suspended In Time
Wendy Constantine
Media: Salted paper on vellum (platinum toned) with genuine silver leaf
Print size: 15” x 5.5”, limited edition of 10 +2 AP
Frame size: 23.25” x 15.25”Price: $1200 framed
Artist Statement:
Reverie Project
2020 - 2023
Walking through grief is an intensely personal journey. My experience felt like falling into a dark hole, alone, with ice covering over the cavity as if to say it never happened. But it did, and during the pandemic the ice began to melt. Reverie is a visual meditation on healing from the ambiguous loss of child before I could become a mother. Beneath the canopy of cottonwoods and willows along the Coal Creek in Lafayette, CO, I imagined a secret landscape that transformed my hidden shame into acceptance and grace. Revisiting the watery grove almost daily, it became the place where I could "hold space" for processing the grief I could not speak of. The gentle current calmed my mind and spirit, while the mother trees stood as symbols of strength and resilience, empowering me to tell my story.
Artist Bio:
Wendy Constantine is a fine art photographer, printmaker and designer based in Broomfield, Colorado. Her work examines our spiritual connection to the natural world and man-made landscapes, finding beauty in both the fragility of life and the resilience of the human spirit. Her vision is influenced by the aesthetics of early modern photography, especially the poetic intimacy of Josef Sudek and Margrethe Mather in addition to Sally Mann, Frank Gohlke and Albarran Cabrera. She has a big love for 19th century analog processes including photogravure, salted paper, gum bichromate and carbon transfer. Her passion for handmade photography and printmaking grew out of a bachelor degree in studio arts from UCLA, followed by a masters in museum studies at Harvard. She has a background in graphic and experience design, and today she is a product design director for a major educational publisher. Her artwork has been frequently published and exhibited in galleries across the United States.
Process:
The Reverie project has been hand printed on vellum using the salted paper process. This involves coating the vellum with a salted water solution, then coating again with silver nitrate before exposing the digital negative and emulsion to UV light. The images are toned in platinum before fixing, and finished with wax on front and hand-gilded with genuine silver leaf on the back and then sealed.
