Last year, our first Artist in Residence programme ended with an exhibition of work by Mary Ngwu and Jimmi Wing Ka Ho, shown across darkroom's gallery space and the darkroom itself.
This Summer, we were delighted to welcome three new artists to the programme: Nelle Laurent, Jivan West and Francisco Macfarlane. Each was given access to our darkroom facilities to develop a body of work. All three have now completed their Residencies, and we are excited to share the outcomes.
The 2026 Residency Show will take place at darkroom on Saturday 10 October, 1–6pm.
Jivan West, a London-based photographer originally from Boulder, Colorado, has a longstanding interest in texture and the way landscapes change over time. During the residency, he developed and printed fifteen rolls of 35mm and 120 film, shot while hiking through Dinorwig Slate Quarry in North Wales.
During his time in the darkroom he enlarged images to different scales and weighed each fragment against the whole. He also experimented with materials and surfaces, piecing prints together. Printed on fibre-based paper to bring out the textures of the slate, the photographs dwell on abstraction, and on how the material quality of the land carries across to the paper that holds it. In the exhibition, the prints come together as one continuous form. Images of different sizes touch and flow into each other to make a single, larger abstraction of the land.
Nelle Laurent is a British-Belgian artist whose hands-on practice often involves experimenting with new processes. Earlier this year, she unearthed her great-great-grandmother's archive of glass stereo photographs, along with the cameras used to make them and a box of negatives.
Nelle spent the Residency printing from these negatives, bringing portraits more than 100 years old back to life. In doing so, she found herself "becoming acquainted with my great-great-grandma, her siblings, her parents, her grandma and more, which just feels incredibly lucky." She also became the first person to use her great-great-grandmother's stereo camera in over a century. The exhibition brings together portraits enlarged from the original negatives, faces of a family more than a century old, alongside nine new stereo photographs of her own, made with the same camera, creating the illusion of three dimensions.
For fourteen days, Francisco Macfarlane returned to the same park bench every morning, sound recorder in hand, capturing everything that passed him by, from small talk to secrets never meant to be overheard.
The most intimate fragments became his prints. He drew them with sound-generated light directly onto silver gelatin paper using a device of his own making, with no camera and no negative. "I was somewhere I shouldn't have been, holding something that wasn't mine." What the prints contain, and what they hold back, will be revealed at the show, alongside a photograph of the bench itself.
Come and meet the artists and see the work. If you are thinking of applying for our 2027 Artist in Residence programme, it's a great chance to find out more about what's involved. The 2026 Residency Show will take place at darkroom on Saturday 10 October, 1–6pm.
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