Beneath showcases Ceitas Atelier’s Prologue, research into Australian artists, and an index of stimuli to effectively curate it’s desired presence.
Prologue
Design - Christian Duyckers
Investigative Research, Conversations
Maps That Melt The Memory of Ice
Visual Compendium - Ceitas Atelier
Shells, 2024.
Photographing seashells is more than a way of admiring their beauty; it is a means of engaging closely with the details of the natural world. The camera forces attention to aspects often overlooked: the intricate spirals, the subtle ridges, and the way light plays across the surface.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
Photography - Christian Duyckers
Stimuli Index
Ceitas reliably credits these artists where due. The use of these images is purely for innovative purposes, cultivating as an index of stimuli.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition: "New Itineraries", Musée de'Elysée,
Lausanne, June 13 - September 8, 1991
Measurements: 58.6 × 92.7 × 36.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1985.
©The estate of Inge King
David Noonan, 2017, Common Editions.
Jungjin Lee, 2025
Sidney Nolan, 1940.
Oil on canvas, mounted on composition board, 73.3 x 88.2 cm
Barbara Hepworth, London, 1943-1958.
Plaster on wood base.
12 ⅞ x 15¾ x 11⅞ in
Hashimoto Naotsugu, 2003. 11.2 × 6.2 cm
Alexander Calder, 1936.
Lignum vitae, walnut wood, paint and steel rods.
51⅞ x 24¼ x 11⅜ in
Deborah Turbeville, 1976.
High Diver I
Gerhard Richter, 1965. Oil On Canvas 190 x 110cm
Provoke Group, Tokyo, Nitesha, 2023
grand vistas, but the slow, forensic work of gathering, classifying, and rendering what the land offers. Working primarily in photomedia and recognised as an authority in the photopolymer photogravure process, she foregrounds craft as a way of keeping time: prints that hold botanical fragments, coastal residues, and the weathered traces of place in their grain and tone.
Glattauer’s In the Shade of a Cactus is a quietly theatrical act: it takes a plant that in casual experience reads as rugged, remote, and thorny, and translates it into a large, sensuous field of tone and memory.
The project begins with the personal—a childhood fascination in her grandmother’s garden and a recurring attraction
to cardón grande cactus on return trips to northwest Argentina—but the work refuses autobiography as anecdote. Instead, it uses personal memory as a way into material
and place. Formally, the series is an argument for scale and process. Printed as a two-plate photogravure at 100 × 70 cm (edition of 10, plus two artist proofs), these are not quaint botanical vignettes but almost cinematic intimacies: the technique allows Glattauer to render a full range of greasy, velvety blacks, soft midtones, and whisper-fine highlights that a photograph alone would flatten. The two plates imply layering—a decision that speaks to doubling (memory and present, homeland and current life) and produces a depth of surface where a cactus’s ribs, spines, and shadow fall with deliberation.
Conceptually, the series performs a subtle translation:
a plant of Argentine landscapes becomes a portable geography, an emblem of diaspora and rootedness that carries both family history and climatic knowledge. That portability matters—photogravure here is not merely a method but a mnemonic device, an analogue archive that preserves light and touch across distance.
There is also an ethical modesty to these prints. They do not demand spectacle; they invite time. The cactus, presented at human scale and with formal generosity, asks the viewer to consider what shelters us, what pricks us, and how the objects of childhood can come to stand in for whole geographies. In In the Shade of a Cactus, Glattauer turns botanical affection into a study of endurance, memory, and the patient generosity of process.
A persistent tension runs through the work between defence and refuge. The cactus carries a reputation for being fierce; the title insists on shade. Glattauer’s prints sit within that paradox: the plant appears as both protector and monument, its silhouette made generous by the print’s scale and the warmth of Glattauer’s tonal choices. Close up, the grain of the photogravure and the hand of the artist make the surface tactile—you can almost feel the barbs; step back, and the compositions settle into repeating rhythms, catalogue-like yet lyrical. This dual register— forensic detail and decorative rhythm—is a familiar insistence in Glattauer’s practice, where archival impulses meet a careful, almost reverent, attention to matter.
©© 2025 Ceitas Atelier. All rights reserved.
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