Helioprints. Printing with sunlight

Helioprints is a body of work resulting from an experiment that uses sunlight’s natural property of bleaching paper. Working on a branding project for a Greek island, we discovered that white paper left in the sun is prone to yellowing and examined ways to harness the process and produce inkless artwork, printed with sunlight. Researching the chemical qualities of paper, we selected untreated papers rich in wood pulp and lignite, that are particularly sensitive to the sun’s natural UV light. To produce the artwork, we made stencils from handprinted and cut typographic elements and collected dry leaves, seeds, and flowers. We arranged the elements on sheets of 5 mm. clear acetate, secured them in frames and laid them on a variety of papers. Experimenting with exposure times, daylight temperatures and other contributing factors, we produced a series of bleached posters printed with sunlight. Each Helioprint constitutes a unique piece of work, a one-of-a-kind contact sheet drawn with sunlight. The natural process gives the prints a unique visual style, a blurring of the edges around the stencils, as objects come in direct contact with the surface of the paper. Body of work 18 Helioprints. Numbered and dated. Exposure: May-October 2022 1-35 hours of natural sunlight, 9.00-17.00, 35οC+. Stencils on Kraft and Sugar paper, 120 gr. (various colours), Newsprint, and Munken Print White paper 90 gr.