Barbara Ghidini
Light into Matter
Sedimenti
2025 – Sediments
Chemigrams: Experimental analog photography on silver gelatin paper
Fine art photography printed on Hahnemühle cotton paper
Dimensions: 30 × 40 cm
Edition: 1/7 + 2 A.P.
Signed and numbered on verso
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From the depths of the paper,
the image rises like sediment from a vanished sea.
Each stain breathes — slow, mineral, ancestral.
Between corrosion and birth,
the matter whispers its own becoming.
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The series Sediments was born from the desire to listen to photographic matter in its slowest breath.
In these chemigrams, gesture withdraws to make space for reaction — for the secret dialogue between emulsion, light, and time.
The images emerge like organic remnants, geological fragments, traces of invisible processes: they do not depict, they reveal.
Color becomes earthy — brown, gold, copper — conveying a sense of return to origin, to a ground still warm with transformation.
Each surface is an alchemical site where dissolution gives birth to new forms, where accident becomes language.
Sediments is a meditation on impermanence and the memory of matter: what remains after the passage of time, what time itself leaves as a trace of life.
Part of an ongoing exploration into the autonomy of silver paper material.
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Vaso Alchemico
2023 – Alchemical Vessel
Chemigrams: Experimental analog photography on silver gelatin paper
Fine art photography printed on Hahnemühle cotton paper
Dimensions: 30 × 40 cm
Edition: 1/7 + 2 A.P.
Signed and numbered on verso
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Alchemical Vessel explores the fragile balance between control and transformation, intention and accident.
Through a process of direct chemical manipulation on photosensitive surfaces, I embrace unpredictability as a generative force.
Each image is a living reaction — light, matter, and time merging into forms that evoke both the organic and the cosmic.
The “vessel” functions as a symbolic container: a site of metamorphosis where substances dissolve, recompose, and give birth to new visual states.
My work transforms photography into an alchemical act — an unpredictable dialogue between the my gesture and the autonomy of material.
Part of an ongoing exploration into the autonomy of silver paper material.
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