Dr Eric Fong’s artistic project, ‘Cyanotype Apparitions’ experiments with cyanotype photography, interleaving the glass plate negatives of Horton Cemetery patients with organic matter foraged from the Cemetery site.
With funding support from a King’s College London Artist in Residency, he has overlain plant cuttings and soil onto the photographs – evoking the transmutation of patients’ graves and the organic material of their bodies into the new growth such as trees, vegetation and foliage.
Gathered botanical materials, such as ivy, have also been crushed to produce a site-specific dye, meaning that some of the reconstituted patient portraits have been produced with a brown or dark green tint, rather than the traditional Prussian blue. He has also reflected artistically on the work undertaken the hospitals, such as needlework.
