2022, unique photogram collage, c-type photographic paper, customised frame, 49x33 cm, unique

David Penny is an artist from Manchester. His practice is informed through an interest in expanded approaches to photography, materiality, objects and their images. Recent projects have been developed on location and in response to specific spaces of production and research, such as a tapestry studio and an archaeological excavation. The works presented at Manchester Contemporary are taken from two different projects, both using handmade, analogue, photographic processes.

A series of abstract photographic prints have been made without the use of a camera, recording light from within a nanophotonics lab at Kings College London. Sheets of photographic film interrupt or are placed in proximity to high-powered lasers that are shaped and directed around a system built for nanomaterials research.

Warming Stripes are a pair of collaged pieces of darkroom paper unintentionally exposed when working in the darkroom. Realising that light leaks had occurred around the edges of contact (proof) sheets from a recent project in Athens, what might normally be discarded was kept, taken to the studio and later constructed as part of Penny's project A Fallen Line of Marble Drums. The horizontal stripes are visually reminiscent of the graphical representation used by climate scientists to indicate global temperature change over time.