Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back visual artist Elaine Nguyen of San Francisco with beautiful and thought-provoking cyanotypes on newsprint, homemade paper, and graph paper. Cyanotype is a similar process to lumen printing, which is also explored in the “Patterns” issue in the work of Melody Locke. A subject is laid upon paper, fabric or other medium treated with an iron salt solution and laid in the sun or under another source of ultraviolet light. The iron salts react with the light, leaving a blue-tinted image on the treated surface, darker in the places where more light is absorbed. Created by Anna Adkins in 1842 to document algae and plant structure, it is an artistic form of photography often used for botanical subjects. Elaine’s works oh no! there are bugs in my hands, Desires I have, and For Sea Fires feature cloudlike, embryonic, abstract shapes.
“I made these shapes in 2023 when I was in grad school. I was cutting fabric, but also cutting plexiglass with the bandsaw, cutting all these forms. And I didn’t really know what they were at the time. At school, they were like, “What is this project? You should just throw it away.” I still felt like there was something interesting there.”
These pieces became vehicles to explore recent challenges in her health after an appendectomy left her seriously ill for almost a year. She didn’t feel well and had little energy or strength. The fabric and plexiglass shapes were easier to work with and helped her keep a tenuous link to creativity. Intuitively she found a link between them and her illness. As she healed, they morphed from “bugs” into “dreams,” taking a more positive cast. It is inspiring to learn how she used art as a way to understand and interpret what she was going through and make a lexicon that shows others her path to deeper wellness.
See Elaine’s beautiful, ephemeral art and read about her creative journey to healing in “Transformative Patterns: Sublimation and Healing in the Cyanotypes of Elaine Nguyen” in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Elaine Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American artist exploring identity, displacement, and the search for home alongside the discovery of new dreams. She uses cyanotypes to capture the fluidity of memory and the passage of time through light. Interested in the emotive aspect of immersion in water and sky, she utilizes blue to convey a sense of wandering and seeking. Her works take on the shapes of clouds, reminiscent of cultural symbols that become sleeping dreams waiting to be discovered, or light filtering through spaces longing to be remembered.
Elaine Nguyen is based in San Francisco, CA. She holds an MFA from UC Davis and a BFA in Painting and BA in Humanities from Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been recently exhibited at the Berkeley Art Center, Root Division, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Roxie Theater, Axis Gallery, among others. She has been an artist in residence at Mass Moca, Foundation Obras, LaSalle Tropical Lab, and was the Blau-Gold Teaching Fellow at Root Division (24/25).