A few words with David Trautrimas...

David Trautrimas (DT): I thought about working with silkscreen initially, but there were mid-tones in one of the larger pieces I wanted to create, "Aphasia", that wouldn’t translate with silkscreen and so we chose to work in cyanotype for that one - once we figured it out. On a whim another day, we decided to expose one of the other pieces as a cyanotype and then it clicked. I realized that screen wasn’t the right medium at all and that cyanotype was instead what we were going to use.

DT: For the two larger works in the series, "Aphasia" and "Choir Practice", yes. I knew there would be some additional smaller pieces that I wanted to make as well which were resolved through the residency but was a lot of preliminary work done with imagery development before we started in the studio. The residency came to be primarily focused on technical growth and exploration rather than concept and content.

DT: In a lot of respects, it felt very familiar. I spent a lot of time at OCAD during my student days and afterwards working in dark rooms using mostly black & white photographic processes and at the end of the day, cyanotype is a photographic process itself: you have light, emulsion, a substrate and a developer. So it shares those fundamental aspects, though when it comes down to the “nitty-gritty”, it is quite different. It was very easy to get an okay result, but very challenging to get a reproducible, precise result. I believe that may be a lack of professional context or resources around cyanotype. A lot of the information we were finding seemed geared towards hobbyists and what Laine and I were trying to do presented a demand for precision and repeatability (especially when it comes to editioning) that saw us running up against a lot of technical challenges. A lot of trial and error. There were times that we’d watch a print just dissolve and bleach out in front of our eyes 10 minutes after we thought we figured something out. Where there would be ample resources for the production of other kinds of processes, we felt like we were really having to build our own recipe for this.

DT: Well, it felt like we both went in as if we were typing with mittens on - just figuring out the location of one key at a time to find some fluency. Laine of course brought a lot of experience handling wet paper which is a big part of the cyanotype process, though we discovered that identical papers reacted very differently through cyanotype as they would through etching even though both similarly involve a multiple-soaking process.

DT: Oh absolutely. And there was a point early on that I had my doubts whether we could actually achieve the results we were looking for with cyanotype, but Laine’s energy and optimism really carried us through at those crucial moments. Just one more test…And as it turned out within a day or two we had figured out those first major hurdles that moved us forward.

DT: The intent at first was to just try cyanotype for the large pool triptych but it really became the gateway drug with the process eventually taking over the whole body of work, and as much as it came with its measures of unpredictability, we came to find it quite flexible. In getting into the process I realized how much can be done with it. The milk carton piece, "D34+|-| IVII 1K", for example, was envisioned initially to be printed as 2-dimensional works, but the more I looked at it and the more we experimented with cyanotype, the more I wanted to make them actual objects and I was interested in the challenge. The fun of that was in trying to push the medium; “can we actually do it?”. The trial and error ended up working really well and I do envision doing more of this kind of sculptural cyanotype work in the future.

DT: In some senses this body of work is a departure; still looking at narrative themes of the human experience but not so much the domestic or every-day. This series is really focused on more global human themes. I was inspired by a term, Vale of Tears, which is a tenet that underpins a lot of religions – from Christianity to eastern philosophy – that asserts life is suffering and that it’s only in the afterlife that we find deliverance from this suffering. I’m not necessarily an ardent believer in the paradise of an afterlife but through lived experience I can say that there is suffering and there are moments of deliverance. I was interested in creating a body of work that spoke to these global themes but also had very personal elements and narratives underpinning them.

DT: I rarely rely on one word to convey something, but it seemed to fit all of the works (directly, conceptually, metaphorically) and how they’re positioned within so many universal narratives of suffering and its counterpoint. The lengths we go to avoid suffering, the lengths we go to find peace, the literal lengths to swim in a pool as a form of meditation, the lengths of distance ancestors physically have travelled to flee from trauma.

DT: Exactly.