Argentea Gallery Exhibit “A Thousand Fallen Blossoms” by Aliki Braine
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Eagerly anticipated after its postponement in 2020, Argentea Gallery is launching 2021 with A Thousand Fallen Blossoms by London-based artist Aliki Braine.
Exhibited for the first time, this exhibition brings elements of Japan to Birmingham through a series of uniquely crafted photographs.
Inspired by a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto during the Sakura cherry blossom season, Braine has created extraordinary images that offer a fresh sense of awe and original interpretation of the immersive experience of Hanami, the traditional Japanese custom of viewing and honouring the transient beauty of cherry blossoms.
For her series, A Thousand Fallen Blossoms, Braine first photographed the pink blossomed tree branches. Imitating the ruination of the laden branches when the petals give way to the force of the breeze, Braine took a holepunch to her colour negatives and created hundreds of tiny discs containing fragments of the original blossoms. Dropping them like ‘negative confetti’ onto the negative holder of the darkroom enlarger, Braine’s process echoes the flurry of falling petals. The random and unpredictable fall of the confetti creates a unique composition that is printed only once before repeating the process.
‘There’s something very satisfying about the temporal nature of the subject, which is a mere two-week window of time in Japanese culture; the act of scattering these confetti negatives reflects its essential ephemerality.’
Braine applied this same technique to photographs of the blue skies framing the blossom and the rainwater on the ground upon which they fell.
Intrigued by the abundance of scattered petals covering the pavements, Braine also made a series of only 17 black and white images that form the basis of 10,000 Fallen Petals. However, frustrated by the too descriptive nature of the images she applied tiny, Japanese stickers to the negatives, individually covering each one that had fallen to the pavement. For each blossom, a sticker; 10,000 in all. Wanting to create a sense of journey and passing time, she states:
‘the spaces covered by the stickers, which read as white in the printing process, become both an abstraction and a kind of memory of the shape that the petal made on the floor’.
The title of this series references a 17th-century Chinese ink painting called 10,000 Ugly Ink Blots by artist and monk Shitao and draws on Braine’s expertise in art history. A hand-bound limited-edition book accompanies the large-scale prints. Structurally mirroring Shitao’s diptych painting, double and triple pages offer beautiful little diptychs and triptychs of the images, complete with a short text by artist, writer and curator Duncan Wooldridge.
A Thousand Fallen Blossoms opens online on Friday 26th March, and the gallery will be open for visitors from Saturday 17th April (restrictions permitting). Stay in touch with the latest news and opening dates from Argentea Gallery via their social media channels on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and website.
