Sayako Sugawara interview - www.rcommendr.com

What led you to explore photography?

My grandfather giving me a camera as a teenager, and then joining Peter Coles’s photography classes at a local community centre almost 15 years ago. Peter is a photographer and researcher who runs Morus Londinium, his long term research and conservation project of mulberry trees in London. He also introduced me to pinhole photography around 2010.

Can you explain a little about your series Portals?

The Portals series derived from images shot on iPhone that originally appeared on my instagram feed. Physically juxtaposing printed images from geographically dissociated environments then reshooting them, the series attempts to create pathways between the physical and temporal places in the images, creating further dimensions within them; closer to how our memories function. The series is also a playful and a longwinded experiment in combining iPhone shot imagery with traditional darkroom printing on expired b/w photographic paper stock.

What are chemigrams and how do you use them in your work?

Chemigram is a cameraless process that stands between photography and painting, invented by Pierre Cordier (1933-2024). The image is created by drawing on a photographically sensitive surface, usually b/w photo paper, with photographic developer and fix, or by using a resist then dipping the paper in photographic chemicals. It is a fascinating process which produces unexpected images. I use plant developers, a less toxic alternative to the conventional chemistry, which brings added surprises with each of the different plants. I enjoy the aspect of Chemigram being mostly about observing and noticing what happens on the photographic paper and letting the process guide you.

Where did you learn the skills to use a darkroom?

At London College of Communication where I did MA Photography to begin with, and then built on that with self study.

how important this physical aspect to your process?

Very. To me the printing process is where the exciting things happens. I always have a practical element in the process of my work to make room for chance to happen. Say with the Portals, by using the expired paper I had to react to the unexpected behaviour of each sheet. With the mountain in sporenland, the solution to make a print larger than the exposure area was to fold the paper in four and expose it four times, adding an element like a game of consequences.

Do you have a favourite piece of art that you have made?

The mountain from the sporenland series is one of my favourites (see above)

Do you have a favourite piece of art that someone else has made?

There are so many across time and genres that are changing all the time too. Odilon Redon’s The Smiling Spider, the fantastic Marlene Dumas’s Black Drawings , The Pine Trees screen (Shōrin-zu byōbu) by Tohaku Hasegawa (the screen versions!) at the Tokyo National Museum and Sotatsu Tawaraya’s White Elephants and the Lion a Yogen-in Temple in Kyoto.