Altered Relics
Updated: Jan 28, 2025
Digital Experimentation
The gallery below shows original photographs I have taken in Lisbon, Portugal (2022) and Palermo, Sicily (2023) of relics and reliquaries displayed in various museums and religious buildings. My long-held fascination for them encompasses a lot of my interests: objects, artefacts, ecclesiastical ephemera, human remains and the mythologies of faith.
The reliquary is the shrine-object which houses or contains the relic which itself is the remains of a person or site of religious significance. Relic derives from Old French relique, and from the classical Latin reliquus meaning 'remains', 'remnants' or 'that which remains' (Online Etymology Dictionary).
In my work, I have become interested in the reliquary window; the section of the reliquary which situates the relic behind a lens of glass. Within this window, the relic itself is often displayed tiny paper labels which identify the name of the person or site of veneration, and the classification of the remains (eg. bone, hair, skin, blood etc). What also interests me are the other ornamental details surrounding the relic. It leads me to wonder who created them; whose 'job' it is; who is the artist?
Original photographs of reliquaries from Palermo, Sicily (2023) and Lisbon, Portugal (2022)
In my practice, I enjoy the process of playing with photographs on Photoshop with the purpose of re-inventing and transforming, and to create new compositions and ideas. In the case of these reliquary photographs, I first wanted to isolate the relic window by cutting them from the reliquary. I then digitally placed them on a dark photographic background and made the whole image high contrast black and white. In this way, the lens-like form of the object with its detail becomes the focal point of the image.
In the following photographs, I was interested in removing the context of the relic as much as possible. The box-like reliquary on the left intrigued me because the relic, a section of spinal vertibrae, seems lost behind the curious beads and filigree in the foreground. I am part-way through an aquatint from this work, and I have started to call it Relic Still Life because it has a strange Memento Mori sense, but because of the metallic floral arrangement, seems part of another, almost steam-punk, world.
I enjoy finding digital methods to enhance particular qualities of photographs and alter the way we perceive the subject. In Relic Still Life, I found a tool which enhanced certain colour values within the photograph which is why the centre of the flower forms are so light and soft, like smudged chalk. In the final colourful edit I split the photograph into its highlights, midtones and shadows, then altered the hue of each to make the image look more like a painting or a monoprint.
black and white edit
Aquatint: Relic Still Life
Zinc aquatint plate with Rhinds varnish to stop out during the 3rd etch
I am still working on the print Relic Still Life, burnishing the details out from the dark background. In particular, my aim is to burnish the bright white areas to give them the soft hazy quality of those in the photograph. As with my other aquatint of the individual oval relic, I want the object to reveal itself through glints of light.
As I look at this print alongside the photograph, I am aware that there is something in the photograph which is lacking from the print; that is, the strange digital quality combined with the diffused light of the edit. It leads me to consider that this photographic quality is important to me. I would like to print a section of this photograph as a small photo etching to see if this preserves the feel of the digital edit.
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