I decided to look into photographing ink after a brain wave that included adding more than one colour to a shape and then labbeling that shape with what the two colours that haven’t mixed together should make; for example a shape filled with blue and red I would label ‘purple’. Then after some experiments with putting two colours together in mediums such as watercolour and acrylic paint I realised that they weren’t as successful as I had hoped for. I then started to think about how I could put two colours together with a medium that wouldn’t mix into a third colour. I thought about ink into water because inks don’t tend to mix for a while after hitting the water.
One of my inspirations for photographing these ink and water images was a photographer names Christiane Zschommler whom I discovered at an exhibition called ‘light works’. – ‘Reflections in water have become the central theme of her photographic work, with the constantly changing rhythm of the reflections being seen to echo the unreliability of memory. The rippling, intensly coloured images showcase the abstract qualities of light and the beauty of every day’. The colours that Christiane Zchommler had captured in her photographs really stood out to me and inspired me to create some of my own intense and beautiful photographs with brightly coloured ink.
Dropping the coloured ink into the water was an amazing process to watch, it almost looked like materials floating around inside the vase that I had used to capture the ink inside. When the ink hits the water it slowly expands and falls down to the bottom of the vase. The patterns created are fascinating to the human eye, there is something that makes you stare at whats infront of you; the pattern? the colours?
kathrynhannahhayes 