Beneath the Surface: Mordançage Prints for Art for All

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Exhibiting fragile, alternative darkroom prints in a bustling shopping mall is a kind of quiet subversion. For Art for All’s “Success & Glory” festival at Easton Hansakäytävä, I set out to create photographs of the mall itself—its passageways, materials, overlooked corners—and transform those images using mordançage, a process that destabilizes photographic surface and exposes hidden structure.

The One-Week Challenge

The schedule was ruthless: shoot, develop, mordançage, frame, and hang, all within days. Camera work and all chemical processing happened at Kameraseura’s darkroom, which became the site of every transformation and experiment. There was no magic shortcut for fragile processes—each wet, unpredictable print was finished, dried, and only then transported for installation.

Making With Found and Local Materials

Frames were sourced from the local SPR Kontti, Finnish Red Cross’s thrift outlet, while passepartouts, fishing wire, nails, pins for hanging, and paper for labels came from nearby stores in the mall. And yes, powering through this frenzied week required serious fuel—a heartfelt shout-out to the awesome matcha from Matcha Crew, which kept the caffeine jitters just about balanced with zen calm. Definitely the unofficial elixir of mordançage marathons.

The exhibition took place in an old office space within Easton mall, which reportedly once served as a book club discussion room. Apparently, people used to gather there to debate books at length—though nowadays, who even reads anymore? Maybe the room awaits its quiet resurrection by new readers or perhaps just naps.

Mordançage Process

Mordançage is violent, physical, and layered. Prints go into a bath of copper chloride, acid, and hydrogen peroxide; the emulsion lifts, veils, and buckles, distorting the original image. Photographs taken of crisp architectural detail became tactile artifacts: ambiguous, unstable, and irreproducible. The process mirrored the theme—what lies beneath the glossy surface can only be revealed through disruption.

Hanging the Works

Installed along the corridor and inside the old office space, the prints felt out of place—fragile in a world of smooth commerce and hurried passage. Framed with thrifted and improvised material, each image quietly demanded viewers reconsider the nature of surface, structure, and transformation. They played off the festival’s premise of success and glory, hinting instead at vulnerability, accident, and the unseen.

Reflection: Art as Intervention

Darkroom processes like mordançage are about timing, risk, and the impossibility of repetition. Showing the results amid the mall’s daily noise charged the work with tension—each print an invitation to pause, notice, and question what’s usually hidden. Art for All’s festival created a platform for exactly this interruption: surfacing the overlooked, giving attention to the fragile, and letting process guide meaning.

Presented at Art for All ‘Success & Glory’ Festival, Easton Hansakäytävä, August 2025. All analog processing completed at Kameraseura darkroom. Thanks to the festival curators, local shops, mall staff, and fellow artists for improvisational creativity and materials, and for the many visitors during the festival.