Herald St

Nick Relph

How Long Is How Long Is The Coast of Britain, Britain?

29th February - 7th August 2020

Herald St | 2 Herald St, E2 6JT

In How Long Is How Long Is the Coast of Britain, Britain?, Nick Relph continues his research into outmoded analogue processes by utilising darkroom development techniques to expose information and detail from photomasks, which is an imaging resource used to transfer information onto microchips, typically invisible to the naked eye. The industrial process of filtering this information from photomasks is through a reduction lens, Relph reverses this process by placing the photomasks into an enlarger, exposing and magnifying the information. Minute details come to light—dates of original production, cracks in the masks, notes from the original owner—reflecting the abstract materiality of the photographs. By printing in colour Relph is able to control the hues and tones; these allow for happy accidents, for the pinks to offset the lush-deep reds that are reminiscent of Japanese lacquers. Darkroom techniques are further exposed at the tops and bottoms of each print where the hand cutting of the paper roll becomes part of the form, this is furthered by the particular way Relph has chosen to box frame these prints leaving room at vertical ends but none on the sides.

Indeed, these chips that Relph magnifies are somewhat invisible, yet crucial, parts of our day-to-day lives. These technological paradoxes as seen in the Lusty Ghost C-prints are furthered by Relph’s on-going video How Long Is How Long Is the Coast of Britain, Britain?, taken from Benoit Mandelbrot’s 1967 essay ‘How Long Is The Coast of Britain?’ (a seminal paper in which he states that the coastline of Britain can’t be measured, because the coastline of Britain is infinite). The video, created from a screen recording, entwines sections of Mandelbrot’s paper with found imagery—a London phone box, Vivienne Westwood and model Jordan Mooney outside Seditionaries on King’s Road in the 70s— amongst other material. Glitching and zooming into digital images, the video echoes similar paradoxes to both the essay and the C-prints.

Relph renders these invisible and inconspicuous, but ever-present objects—photomasks, information on microchips, Britain’s border—seen, elevating them above and beyond their functions, into new, elegant, and poetic existence.