"Les Travailleurs de la mer".
Exhibiting at The Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2025, supporting 'Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo'.
To love beauty is to see light.
- Victor Hugo
They say when your time comes your life flashes before you, referring to the experience of suddenly remembering many events from one's life, often in quick succession, as if viewing a rapid slideshow.
Well, if this is true, one slide of mine will definitely be the moment I had a piece of work exhibited in the hallowed halls of the Royal Academy of Arts to support the extraordinary exhibition: 'Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo'.
Sponsored by VisitGuernsey, Astonishing Things, presented a remarkable selection of Victor Hugo's rarely seen works at the Royal Academy in London.
On Thursday, 20th March, the evening before the exhibition’s public opening, an intimate event took place allowing Visit Guernsey to welcome 25 top UK journalists alongside key stakeholders, including arts, history, and tourism experts, as well as Victor Hugo scholars, artists, and curators.
The event served as an exceptional platform to celebrate Hugo’s artistic brilliance while showcasing the Islands of Guernsey as a premier cultural destination. Journalists from The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and Wanderlust mingled with local experts beside a unique, one-night-only installation curated by Art for Guernsey , in partnership with and commissioned by Visit Guernsey.
It was in this installation my work was showcased alongside two other Victor Hugo-inspired works: intricate illustrations by Daniel Hosego, evocative lithographs by Oleg Mikhailov - both of whom contributed to Art for Guernsey’s A Renaissance of Victor Hugo exhibition in 2023.
My piece was atmospheric wet plate photograph, the same practiced by Victor Hugo’s son Charles, aptly titled, "Les Travailleurs de la mer".
Process: The Journey of capturing "Les Travailleurs de la mer".
Let's imagine that you're taking a cliff walk with friends to le gouffre and the cliff tops that inspired the works of Hugo. Moreover, you'd like to capture the adventure.
Today, you would just need carry along a small camera or mobile phone; the kind that you can instantly replay back with all the immediacy of the digital world.
But what about in times past? If you went back, to, say, 1866, the time 'Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo was published, the story would be quite different.
For one thing, you'd be dealing with heavy glass plates. The camera, too, would be heavy, as well as bulky. And chances are you'd be working with wet-collodion plates, which would mean that (in addition to your camera and glass plates), you would also need to carry on your back a complete darkroom, with all its chemicals, and in your head a fairly in-depth knowledge of chemistry.
As if all of that wasn't enough, every time you decided to take a picture, you'd have to set up your darkroom tent, prepare a glass plate, then expose and develop the plate while it was still wet.
All the above happened one day during February, so this glass plate you see below (right before its transformation in the fix bath) could hang in the scared walls of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, supporting the exhibition 'Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo'.
