Actinic Traces

Phytograms and Chlorophyll Prints

Actinic Traces

Phytograms and Chlorophyll Prints

Adkins Arboretum, Eastern Shore, Maryland

2025

Actinic Traces is a body of work that explores the quiet, transformative interactions between light, plants, and time through the processes of chlorophyll printing and phytography. Using leaves, sun exposure, and the internal chemistry of plant matter, I collaborate with natural systems to create images that resist permanence and precision, favoring instead ephemerality, decay, and organic authorship.

In the chlorophyll prints, photographic transparencies are laid on living leaves and exposed to sunlight over hours or days. The sun, through its actinic rays, bleaches away the chlorophyll in exposed areas, leaving behind imprints—fading memories embedded in the leaf’s surface. In phytograms, plants are first used to make a plant-based developer and then are pressed onto light-sensitive film, where their own biochemical signatures—tannins, oils, moisture—etch abstract forms and textures onto the surface.

Both processes rely not on domination of materials but on attentive coexistence with them. The image is not imposed but emerges from a dialogue with the plant, with time, and with elemental forces like sun, air, and water. The resulting works are records of entanglement, traces of light’s quiet labor on living matter.

Actinic Traces invites viewers to consider image-making as a collaborative act with the more-than-human world—a practice rooted in slowness, impermanence, and care. These works are not static artifacts; they are temporal surfaces, slowly fading, reminding us of our shared fragility and deep entwinement with the ecologies we often overlook.