Nat Faulkner produces images — but also the potential for images. He uses photography’s sleight of hand, from the micro to the macro, to sculpt with images and give materiality to perception, with its inherently shifty, malleable, and stretchy nature. “Shifty,” “malleable,” “stretchy”: these terms can equally be applied to the artist’s mode of working, the spatial logistics of his studio, which can take on the attributes of a darkroom if and when needed — the irony of its southeast London location, with its proximity to the Royal Observatory Greenwich, is not lost on me — or even the material forms, shapes, and imprints of his finished pieces, whether they be photographs, sculptural objects, or something in between. The perceived simplicity of his gestures is what paradoxically gives his visual and formal vocabulary its intricacy. For things are never what they seem to be on the surface.
In “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” a short essay published in 1989, the artist Jeff Wall pits the “watery” aspects of the photographic process (namely, the liquid solutions which help develop and then subsequently fix the memory-trace of an image on light-sensitive paper), and their seemingly ontological proximity to ancient production processes (washing, bleaching, dissolving), against its “dry” optical and mechanical counterpart (the lens and the shutter). For Wall, there is an incessant tug-of-war at play between the latter’s technological intelligence of image-making—one that is deeply connected to modernity and its necessity for exclusion, precision, containment, and control—and what he terms a fluid as “liquid intelligence” that is more closely associated with a sense of immersion in the incalculable. As an example, Wall cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi film Solaris (1972), in which a group of scientists on a space station begin to slowly lose their minds while researching an oceanic planet. The ocean, a substance itself capable of thought, exerts a perverse experiment on the experimenters themselves, and returns their own memories to them as perfectly formed hallucinations. Despite modernity claiming supremacy by way of knowledge production and its own claims to reality, the question ultimately broached is: could we instead harbor a preference for “liquid intelligence” and not its straight-edge cousin? If Jeff Wall’s answer is to have his work straddle that fine line between photography and painting, Nat Faulkner draws a line between photography and non-photography through a recourse to scientific and philosophical thought, to language and ritual.
For his exhibition “Days,” held at Roland Ross in Margate in early 2024, Faulkner maximized the possibilities for visual deception. The middle of the room was taken up by a cast iron radiator positioned horizontally on a wooden skate on wheels (Untitled, 2024). Among the materials cited for this reworked objet trouvé is helium gas, its presence denoted, or hinted at, by a piece of pale orange plastic tubing that Faulkner left attached to the radiator’s valve, creating an invisible tension in the room due to the imbalance between the gallery’s air density and that contained within the weighty confines of the radiator. Presumably, it became lighter, though Faulkner never bothered to actually weigh the object.
While earlier art-historical antecedents, such as Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961) and Artist’s Breath (1960), used the language of irony and provocation to offer up a commentary on the commodification and fetishization of the artist’s (literal) output, instilling both symbolic and market value through an alchemical transformation of shit into gold, Faulkner dabbles in the intricacies of perception itself, in the magic touch, the benefit of the doubt, or the leap of faith that attaches itself, even momentarily, to any work of art or cultural product.
What is at stake in Untitled (2024) is a state of potential tension or change, the lighter-than-air radiator unable to lift itself off the ground, forever tied to the laws of gravity. It is a narrative in the making. In a not dissimilar fashion, a pair of glass flasks (also Untitled, 2024), placed on their sides, no longer have any capacity to hold and contain. Instead of allowing whoever’s gaze to pierce through the flasks’ transparent, curved surface, Faulkner used a chemical reaction to coat their insides in silver. Placed like a pair of eyes on the tiled floor, they reflected the microcosm of the enveloping gallery space back to the viewer, distorting its lines and angles in the process. Also coated in silver, or more precisely, unfixed silver leaf, is an array of variously shaped and sized plastic bottles in Print (2023), which made up a portion of “Couples” (2023), an earlier exhibition at the London-based non-profit space Mackintosh Lane. Through this silvered appearance, both works display an opacity and solidity that is not originally or naturally theirs for the taking. Yet it’s a solidity that is precarious, unstable, and ultimately beyond the artist’s control. As time passes, the unfixed silver elements change appearance, fogging and tarnishing, bringing to light blemishes, stains, and imperfections that had hitherto gone unnoticed.
Silver makes recurring appearances in Faulkner’s practice. This is not a surprise given that silver is a crucial element in analogue photography when used to coat light-sensitive film and paper, and, due to its highly reflective qualities, in the production of mirrors. If the nature of photography is to capture a moment in time, to fix it, however (im)permanently (let’s not forget the beauty industry’s vaunting of silver for its anti-aging properties), Faulkner’s works tend to momentarily capture, obfuscate, and return images and reflections back to their sources, all the while never impeding their further development, in much the same way that archival prints will yellow and fade – the speed of the image recession often dependent on external environmental factors, the presence of residual chemicals, or an insufficient length of fixing during the processing stage. While a return to their original state of being is never officially off-limits, the reality is that although they may look the same, they are effectively not the same.
In this sense, Faulkner, who came to photography after first having studied and worked with sculpture, undertakes an assemblage or layering that recalls the conceptually heavy and experimental work of Simon Starling, whose complex installations–often containing machinery, film, photographs, objects, performances, and publications–result from a particular situation, event, or narrative almost always related to the historically-charged development of science and technology. Like in storytelling, one thing always leads to another, resulting in a near-constant state of transformation, metamorphosis, and exchange, from material to object, from substance to form, or from site to site. When invoking photography in previous interviews, Starling has spoken of the experience of sliding a sheet of paper into a vat filled with chemicals and watching the image slowly surface as “verging on the alchemical.” For him, photography remains a process-based technique, and it is this focus on the journey–rather than the end result–that connects image-making to other archaic processes, such as refining and casting metal.
Faulkner is also quick to highlight the lure of the darkroom, and the capacity for error and accident that it provides and he actively seeks out. The images the artist takes are captured either with a simple point-and-shoot camera that he constantly carries around with him—which amplifies the chance nature of the resulting compositions—or a medium-format camera for prolonged sessions that require prior organization. With the black-out blinds pulled down in his otherwise light-filled studio, these are then developed using a standard darkroom enlarger before finally finding their way into printing drums that are kept neatly stacked on a shelf below Faulkner’s work desk.
Subtle and not directly in the line of vision, Faulkner’s working methods share similar qualities with his finished pieces and extend to his exhibitions. In other words, they are hidden in plain sight. Such was the case with “Albedo,” an exhibition that took place last summer at Brunette Coleman’s two-room gallery in London. While one half of the gallery housed a set of Chromogenic prints on Fuji archive paper (Artificial Sun and Sculpture, both 2024), taped onto acrylic and plywood grounds, as well as three tall and narrow sculptural objects made from borosilicate glass — resembling the tubes most often found in medical and science laboratories — the other half of the space was fully sealed off by a glass partition, itself enclosed in an aluminum frame not unlike the ones that occasionally frame his prints (Invisible light (3), 2023) or the aluminum dibond sheets on to which he collages them (Ground light, 2023). Interior (2024) then became a moving image of sorts, a double exposure in which a variety of images superimposed themselves. Firstly, it was the partitioned-off room at Brunette Coleman, whereby the sole possibility of penetrating it with the visitors’ gaze meant that the work consisted effectively of observing the shifting natural light conditions during the course of each day, as sunlight streamed into and lit up the space through a side window. Secondly, it was the small borrowed painting on canvas from Faulkner’s childhood that hung on the reverse surface of the glass, its back to the viewer and only its title appearing on the painting’s verso. Bearing the nostalgic name Clair de lune sur la Pointe du Raz from a painting that belongs to the artist’s mother and he grew up seeing daily in his family home, this piece lent the whole ensemble a mood that was decidedly individual. After all, how many moonlit scenes can each of us conjure in our mind’s eye?
Could it be said then that Nat Faulkner peddles in affect and feeling rather than in representation? When we met in December, Faulkner was already ruminating on a new body of work to be produced for a solo exhibition at London’s Camden Art Centre in January 2026. As a natural extension of his interest in the environment of the darkroom, both architecturally and conceptually, he has spent the past year collecting used black-and-white fixative from community darkrooms all across London. These chemicals are regularly reused until they become “depleted” and no longer contain a potent enough mixture to work effectively before being disposed of safely.
This is the point at which Faulkner intervenes, syphoning off the silver-enriched fixative which he describes as “the distilled photographic output of an entire city—the collective waste product of thousands of people’s captured moments: their holidays, loved ones, and fleeting memories.” Small vats of this solution sit in his studio, with Faulkner using it as a plating bath to electroplate small sheets of conductive metal, primarily made of copper. Before submerging them into the liquid, he uses frottage to make physical impressions on their surface. Crops of the artist’s studio door or the parquet flooring appear as a sculptural image, an additional layer of portraiture–with a dash of psychogeography thrown in for good measure–reminiscent of Heidi Bucher’s latex “skins” of interiors. A technique that the Swiss artist developed in the 1970s to make latex imprints of domestic interiors, this gesture was at once fetishistic and prompted by the desire to capture the layers of history and memory that each space holds. They also bring to mind the late British neurologist and naturalist Oliver Sacks’s notion of a “landscape of disordered time,” describing the varied movement of patients observed in 1966 during a visit to a hospital for chronic illnesses in the Bronx. Sacks’s writings on movement, speed, disorders of time, and the volatile nature of perceptions and use of instruments to enhance them invariably funnel into Faulkner’s own research. His new work might have tinges of nineteenth-century spiritism about it, but it continues his trajectory into willfully abandoning control and precision. In both cases, the door is left open for a full-on invocation of ghosts.
