Beneath showcases Ceitas Atelier’s Prologue, research into Australian artists, and an index of stimuli to effectively curate it’s desired presence.
Prologue
Design - Christian Duyckers
Investigative Research, Conversations
Visual Compendium - Ceitas Atelier
Shells, 2024.
Photographing seashells is more than a way of admiring their beauty; it is a means of engaging closely with the details of the natural world. The camera forces attention to aspects often overlooked: the intricate spirals, the subtle ridges, and the way light plays across the surface.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
Photography - Christian Duyckers
Stimuli Index
Ceitas reliably credits these artists where due. The use of these images is purely for innovative purposes, cultivating as an index of stimuli.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition: "New Itineraries", Musée de'Elysée,
Lausanne, June 13 - September 8, 1991
Measurements: 58.6 × 92.7 × 36.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1985.
©The estate of Inge King
David Noonan, 2017, Common Editions.
Jungjin Lee, 2025
Sidney Nolan, 1940.
Oil on canvas, mounted on composition board, 73.3 x 88.2 cm
Barbara Hepworth, London, 1943-1958.
Plaster on wood base.
12 ⅞ x 15¾ x 11⅞ in
Hashimoto Naotsugu, 2003. 11.2 × 6.2 cm
Alexander Calder, 1936.
Lignum vitae, walnut wood, paint and steel rods.
51⅞ x 24¼ x 11⅜ in
Deborah Turbeville, 1976.
High Diver I
Gerhard Richter, 1965. Oil On Canvas 190 x 110cm
Provoke Group, Tokyo, Nitesha, 2023
I studied drawing and later painting at art school, and to be honest, I was pretty resistant to the push from various tutors to think about printmaking. It wasn’t until I began making artist books, alongside friends who were printmakers themselves, that I started to experiment with various print processes. With their guidance and support, I made my first print, which was an aluminium plate lithograph.
At that time, I didn’t really have access to a print studio or a press, so I started working with monotypes which I could do with a hand baren. At first, I was trying to emulate the drawn, crayon-like marks of stone lithography, but I soon became interested in the painterly qualities you can achieve with monotypes. I loved the speed, the immediacy, and the decisiveness of the process, and the fact that once the plate goes through the press, the print is done. That finality felt both terrifying and exhilarating.
I’m wondering if you could discuss your style, it’s very dynamic and the tones leave much room for impressions and curiosities. I find the shaping to be very unique, what do you believe leads you to produce your art in this way?
I think, if I have a style, it’s developed through a combination of intuition, resistance, and maybe even frustration, and certainly a lot of experimentation. I often find myself resisting the pull to depict something too literally. In fact, I get frustrated by overly direct representation. I want the viewer to bring their own assessment, their own experience, and to see themselves reflected or challenged in the work.
There’s a lot of power in simplicity. We project so much onto each other, onto our environments – our capacity to distort reality is wild. I’m often working with ideas that are difficult to articulate in words, be it emotional states, memory, disorientation, tension. The marks become a way of holding that ambiguity.
The forms tend to emerge slowly, through layering and erasure. I’m drawn to shapes that hover; things that feel familiar but can’t quite be placed. I think the dynamism comes from the constant negotiation between control and spontaneity, where an image always feels on the verge of forming or falling apart.
I also work in sporadic bursts, in almost a frenzy. Once I’ve developed the language or the internal logic of a series, I’ll print rapidly, making many variations, then step back and extract the ones that hold something. It’s a hyperactive process followed by exhaustion. I am glad to hear that the work feels dynamic, as it often arrives that way.
I’m wondering if you could discuss your style, it’s very dynamic and the tones leave much room for impressions and curiosities. I find the shaping to be very unique, what do you believe leads you to produce your art in this way?
I think, if I have a style, it’s developed through a combination of intuition, resistance, and maybe even frustration, and certainly a lot of experimentation. I often find myself resisting the pull to depict something too literally. In fact, I get frustrated by overly direct representation. I want the viewer to bring their own assessment, their own experience, and to see themselves reflected or challenged in the work.
There’s a lot of power in simplicity. We project so much onto each other, onto our environments – our capacity to distort reality is wild. I’m often working with ideas that are difficult to articulate in words, be it emotional states, memory, disorientation, tension. The marks become a way of holding that ambiguity.
The forms tend to emerge slowly, through layering and erasure. I’m drawn to shapes that hover; things that feel familiar but can’t quite be placed. I think the dynamism comes from the constant negotiation between control and spontaneity, where an image always feels on the verge of forming or falling apart.
I also work in sporadic bursts, in almost a frenzy. Once I’ve developed the language or the internal logic of a series, I’ll print rapidly, making many variations, then step back and extract the ones that hold something. It’s a hyperactive process followed by exhaustion. I am glad to hear that the work feels dynamic, as it often arrives that way.
“Monotypes occupy this beautiful, delicate space between drawing, painting and print.”
Having recently been producing photo polymer prints, I realised that most hand printing techniques are very methodical and require considerate patience but are very gratifying once completed. As there are so many printing techniques, I’m curious as to why monotype printing has stuck out to you among the rest?
I think it’s the directness, the immediacy, for me. Monotypes occupy this beautiful, delicate space between drawing, painting and print.
There’s a thrill in knowing you only get one shot, so you have to be present and decisive, but also spontaneous and reactive. It’s high stakes, in a way, because you can’t overwork it or endlessly refine the image. That immediacy aligns closely with how I think.
Your monotype prints mainly revolve around landscape imagery, what about landscapes has encouraged you to produce these prints?
Landscape, for me, isn’t just about topography or a physical place – it’s very much about the emotion, disorientation, memory, and presence of somewhere I have experienced, or imagined. I use the horizon line, or the idea of a place, as a structure to explore scale, time, grief, and the things we can’t quite put a name to.
Lastly, I’m very interested in your series “hummadruz”; as the series relates to unidentifiable sounds, I’m curious as to the shape/design of the monotype print, how do you believe that this final piece targets the unknown?
Hummadruz is about the untraceable, the unknowable and the foreboding sense that something is coming, that something is about to change. Visually, I tried to echo that ambiguity through soft, vibrating forms that resisted a fixed reading. The shapes are suspended, like echoes caught mid-air, and the tonal fields suggest something just beyond the edge of perception. The series plays with presence and absence – what we think we hear, or see, but can’t quite grasp. I had just come from a period of research on Antarctic ice sheets, and in a way, I was still thinking about the fracturing of glaciers and ice into splinters, and how they disperse and disappear. There is definitely a link here between the two fields but I am still working that out.
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