Beatrice Thornton "Balsamic Time"

Balsamic Time features recent plant-developed gelatin silver fiber prints by Oakland-based artist, archivist, and historian Beatrice Thornton. Beatrice’s practice centers on using sustainable darkroom processes to develop film and make prints using homemade chemistry from foraged plants to communicate ideas about place with geometric arrangements of exposures on a single sheet of paper.  

This installation at the gallery in Small Works SF includes a series of multi-image compositions made from 35mm gelatin silver film shot mostly while hiking along the California coast and in Mexico City. The works, or “balsamic moments,” climb across the gallery walls, intersecting to form diagonals and zig-zags.

Balsamic Time is an herbalist practice for harvesting plants when their healing properties are most potent. It is also the final waning crescent of the lunar chart and considered a period of introspection. To make each of her film and print developers, Beatrice brews a tea from foraged plants specific to the locations pictured but also mindful of the plants’ medicinal uses as they might relate to her imagery. For instance, mugwort is commonly used to induce dreaming. 

These works reconsider the frame — both as it appears on a roll of film and the rectilinear format in which photographs are typically printed in the darkroom— through her use of overlapping negative frames and circular masks to obscure and create alternative experiences of the same image through repetition. Her work also considers relationships to place through references to art and design history, poetry, and Buddhist and environmental concepts, mingled with biographical details.