Delaware By Hand - Presenting the Artists and Artisans of Delaware

A R T I S T / A R T I S A N P R O F I L E

Nancy Breslin

Photography

237 Cheltenham Rd.
Newark, DE 19711

302-731-8112
nbreslin@udel.edu
www.nancybreslin.com

Twitter: @nbres

Artist Statement

Our thoughts and memories distort things. Since my photographic work (one way or another) serves as a visual journal, I don't typically use it to capture the world in a literal way. My longest series, Squaremeals: A Pinhole Diary of Eating Out, consists of over a thousand of my restaurant meals (since 2002) captured by pinhole camera. The vantage points are odd. The people who were there are made ghost-like by the long exposures.

A smaller but growing series is Amenites, which features diptychs of pools and bathroom counters from hotels I have visited. I recall returning from a cross country road trip as a teen with a collection of soaps and sugar cubes, each bearing the name of a place where we had stopped. Decades later, for reasons I can't recall, I began to photograph the display of soap and shampoo in each hotel I visited. Hotel pools soon followed, and a project was born. When captured by a pinhole camera, busy pools look serenely empty. Tiny bottles of shampoo can look grand or pathetic. Each place, different in its way yet also so like the last one, becomes preserved for me.

I have also increasingly been drawn to working in antique photographic processes. I have created sculptural, sewn objects by printing in cyanotype (the "blue print" process that dates to the 1840s) on fabric. I have created softly pictorialist color prints from toy camera negatives using gum bichromate, and have used Van Dyke Brown with large format digital negatives to make portraits. And when an idea is time-based I have turned to video.

I have received Individual Artist Fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2003 and 2008 and have had solo or two person exhibitions of my work in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Elkton, Dover, Arlington and San Antonio. My work has been profiled in a number of print and online journals, including Light Leaks, The Delmarva Quarterly, the Tusculum Review, Without Lenses and Shutterbug. I have taught classes at the University of Delaware and have given lectures or workshops at regional schools, art centers and museums.