Emerging artist Kasia Wozniak’s traditional photography techniques make for ethereal images

A new show at London gallery Incubator presents the work of a photographer who revels in the slow delights of a bygone technique. Kasia Wozniak – who moved to London from Poland after school – works with a 19th-century Gandolfi camera and a wet-plate collodion process, producing deep, hazy, black and white images that could have been taken 150 years ago or yesterday. While most photographers are free to shoot frame after frame, the cumbersome ritual of Wozniak’s process means she may only be able to capture a scene once, attuning her to the preciousness of a given moment.

She came across wet-plate collodion while still at university. ‘I was looking for a way to step away from the digital world,’ she says. ‘I wanted something slower, more intentional. I was instantly drawn to its materiality and mystery. I feel like I finally have a time machine.’

Her show, borrowing its title, 'Stillpoint', from a TS Eliot poem, centres around three subjects of both humdrum mundanity and cross-cultural symbolic fascination: eggs, stones and the self. The rough, weighty forms of rocks collected over the years from the Margate coast are etched onto oxidised copper plates, creating meditations on what it means to find one’s place on unfamiliar terrain.

Other images pair ethereal orb-like eggs with urgently composed self-portraits taken in yoga poses. Wozniak was recently an artist-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation, which was set up by Alexander McQueen to support the creatives of the future, and her fascination with eggs began during her time at the foundation when she photographed one balanced on a chair once belonging to McQueen while waiting for a sitter. Since then, she has returned to the form again and again, captivated by its promise of endless beginning.

But despite the ethereal timelessness of her images, Wozniak is not interested in a sentimental return to the past. Instead, her work explores liminal space – ‘that threshold where one thing becomes another, where time, identity and place start to blur’ – as well as concepts of permanence and fragility, dream and decay, and all told with an awareness of the ambiguity of the results.

‘I want to explore whether the wet-plate collodion process can speak in a contemporary way. I love how tactile and unpredictable it is. You can’t just press a button; you have to work with your hands, with chemistry, with light. The accidents, the imperfections – they become part of the story.’

‘Stillpoint’ is on show until 29 June 2025 at Incubator, London W1

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