Elijah’s arty flashback
ELIJAH Clarke has gone above and beyond what most uni students would for an assignment.
The JCU Bachelor of Creative Media Arts photography major travelled to Melbourne to learn how to create tintype images, a process popular in the 1850s.
“No one does it here in Townsville; it’s a very technical process, very heavily reliant on chemistry,” he said.
Tintypes are created by a wet plate process, where a black “tin” plate is coated with collodion, exposed in a large format camera and processed in a darkroom before the plate is dry.
“It’s basically creating your own film and developing it straight afterwards,” Mr Clarke said.
“I shoot digital for a lot of commissioned work that I do and I did become a bit bored of that.
“So for my personal work I shoot a lot more film and use more alternative processes.”
Mr Clarke said while the historical technique was not hugely popular, doing things in an old- fashioned way was becoming a trend in itself.
“I think analog technology is definitely making a comeback – record players, film, they’re all coming back in,” he said.
“( Tintypes) won’t become the most popular or anything, it takes around 25 minutes to make one photo and it’s quite expensive, but we will see more people casionally.”
Mr Clarke said he was keen to display his work at JCU’s graduate exhibition, Mobius, from November 3 at Pinnacles Gallery.
He said recognition from the exhibition could poten- doing it oc- tially launch him into graduate employment.
“I’ve had a fair bit of positive feedback so far from lecturers, which is good,” he said.
“But I’m interested to hear from the wider arts community if they have positive or negative comments and how I can apply that,” he said. JCU creative arts students will host a team trivia night to assist with funding their exhibition at the Kryptic Lounge Bar tonight from 7pm.
Visit mobiusexhibition. com/ events/ trivia- night/ for more information.