Bridget Smith: Objects in Space & Silver Moons

Bridget Smith’s presentation for Frieze London demonstrates the artist’s ongoing interest in photography’s ‘expanded field’, pushing the medium into the realm of sculpture and moving image whilst also adopting some of photography’s earliest methods. Earlier works include Smith’s large-scale cyanotypes, a process originally used to create architectural blueprints and chosen by the artist for the particularity of the image it creates.

For the series Objects in Space (2019-22) and Silver Moons (2022), Smith worked with tintype photographer Nicky Thompson to produce a set of small, postcard-sized ambrotypes and tintypes, processes developed in the 1850s as a more affordable alternative to daguerreotypes. Objects in Space capture and document certain natural objects, recalling still unknown realms such as the depths of the ocean or outer space. Despite their antiquated mode of production, the dense dark background brings to mind the liquid-crystal display screen of a mobile phone – a device that people receive most of their images on today.

 Silver Moons depicts luminescent spheres, each hovering in what appears to be the deep black of space, conjuring thoughts of the moon and its phases. The photographs are created by exposing tin plates coated in silver nitrate in a large format camera, their materiality paralleling the metaphorical descriptions of the ‘silver’ light of the moon.