SARAH RITCHIE

THROUGH THE SMOKE

November 12th – December 13th, 2026

Through the Smoke continues Sarah Ritchie’s experimental approach to making photographic prints without a camera. Drawing on her background in fine art printmaking and an enduring love of darkroom photography, Sarah has reimagined a kind of hybrid photographic printmaking process to produce an output which is both traditional print and photograph, but – arguably –neither one nor the other.

Instead of using a light sensitive film, as you would in a camera, transparent polyester is used as a substrate – a stand-in negative –which is roughened to create a ‘tooth’. The textured surface is then smoked in the manner of a hard-ground etching using the sooty flame of a wax taper candle to create a blackened and semi-opaque ground into which to create a negative image; and which lends itself to intentional and sometimes incidental erasures.

Sarah has developed and refined this novel technique over several years to explore its vast potential for mark-marking. The smoked, carbonised ground is delicate and is strategically cut, shaped and altered, drawn into, scratched and worked using printmaking tools and firm-bristled brushes to create a field of hand-drawn, semi-transparent windows through which light travels and is arrested in a contact exposure process to be printed in the darkroom.

There is something familiar in the compositional fragments which allude to aerial maps or geographical charts. The works invite reflection on the rich and detailed surfaces which accentuate the ruled lines and marks made by hand; but the residue of the smoking process is pervasive, and the singed marks are unsettling and repelling. If indeed geographical features, they are neglected and de-humanised forms containing or bordered by darkness.

Sarah’s series of works play with our collective expectations and fixed notions of a photograph verses a traditional print, blurring the boundary between factual record and fantastical illustration. And while the exhibition title references the technique of creating the hand-made negatives, Through the Smoke literally captures light travelling through a carbonised smoky atmosphere in a subtle nod to the more bleak and potentially disastrous mark of human activity on the natural world.

Sarah Ritchie, 2026