Mehregan Meysami’s new series of images The Anatomy of a Shadow can be described as a meditation on the instability of vision – how shadows, water and memory never stand still. In this series, light, water and shadow meet in a layered choreography. The images show a shadow cast across the water’s surface, interrupted by a circular vortex from a passing boat.
The Anatomy of a Shadow I and Where the Light Falls III
– The works are based on a recurring scene at the lake Drevviken, near where I live. I pass the place daily, and with each season the reflections of the trees change – the light is refracted in new ways, and the water constantly registers new optical events.
– I am interested in its temporality, movements and shifts; in the dialogue between the fleeting and the fixed.
Image from the work process, where the blue color of the cyanotype has been partly bleached away and then tinted
Each work is created through a multi-layer process in cyanotype, with bleaching and tinting with madder root (Rubia tinctorum). Each layer is exposed separately, where certain parts are masked and re-exposed to build up depth and resonance. The bleaching itself takes several hours, followed by a full day of tinting – a process that is very temperature-sensitive, where even a slight cooling of the bath can change the color from deep to pale. Through these time-consuming transformations, the images bear both the physical traces of light and the slow rhythm of creation.
A work of art is tinted in a bath of madder root
Mehregan Meysami (b. 1990, Tehran) was educated in Tehran, Pasadena, Oslo and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, with a master's degree from the latter in 2022. She has lived and worked in Stockholm since.
