Nat Faulkner’s studio is running the show

When I visit Nat Faulkner’s North Greenwich studio it’s in a strange lull – the calm after the install. The work has left for Faulkner’s new exhibition at Camden Art Centre, ‘Strong Water,’ which opens on the day of our meeting. What remains is the apparatus of a practice that is grounded in photographic processes: scraps of copper sheeting scattered underfoot, a print drum standing on its end like a totem, an enlarger perched on top of a plan chest. Slightly apart from all this, against one wall, sits a hulking Morso guillotine, the kind used for cutting picture frames. Faulkner tells me he bought it when he took the risk of scaling up to this studio two years ago – an insurance policy, in case things didn’t quite work out, he could always fall back on framing. He mentions, almost offhandedly, that he’s thinking of selling it now.

The 30 year-old Faulkner, whose exhibition comes after being awarded the 2024 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize, is bright, open and still visibly charged with the residual adrenaline of having just installed his debut institutional show. The studio, temporarily emptied of work, has the peculiar air of a place that’s constantly being used to think with: scuffed floors, taped edges and surfaces. In Faulkner’s work the studio isn’t just where things get made – its parameters dictate scale, tone, and temperament.

“A lot of why I work with analogue photography is because it anthropomorphises the studio, it becomes like a collaborator,” says Faulkner. This is not a loose personification but a practical redistribution of agency. In ‘Strong Water,’ the studio quite literally collaborates: its floors and walls are pressed into copper, their textures transferred by hand and then translated again through electroplated silver. The studio yields its own image and behaves like a light-sensitive body, registering contact and accumulating traces.

That logic carries through the exhibition, where fragments of the studio’s skin are reassembled into a partial, 1:1 apparition. The work does not depict the studio so much as allow it to reproduce itself elsewhere, using electricity, chemistry and time as its means. Even the slow tarnishing of the silver, seen in Analogue (Window), 2026, continues this collaboration beyond the point of installation, as the gallery’s atmosphere – humidity, breath, pollution – takes up the role previously played by dust, fingerprints and light leaks in the darkroom. What emerges is a practice in which authorship is dispersed across systems: architectural, chemical and electrical.

“I was thinking a lot about provenance in preparation for this show,” says Faulkner. “I was interested in what kind of vitality stays in a material across various state changes, this idea that material has a kind of memory.” In ‘Strong Water,’ that question plays out as both metaphor and method. Fixative, used in the final chemical step of analogue printing, carries away unused silver from photographic paper. Reused again and again, it becomes visibly saturated, a murky record of accumulated image-making. Faulkner drove to multiple community dark rooms across the city, siphoning off this waste product and extracting the silver to plate copper reliefs. The result was chemically volatile: the silver was impure, prone to rapid tarnishing, but the logic stuck. “In that case, the provenance is the photographic output of a city,” explains Faulkner. “Because in order to distill that much silver, you need [the waste product of] hundreds of thousands of photographs.” 

That idea is, quite literally, refined in the show, where all the plated works are made using a much purer silver extracted from old NHS X-ray sheets. The X-ray matters not just as source but as image: an interior made exterior. That logic runs neatly alongside the copper rubbings, which translate the inside of Faulkner’s private studio into a public surface.

Comparisons with artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Heidi Bucher are readily acknowledged by Faulkner – not as templates to be reproduced, but as precedents for thinking about inversion. “What [Whiteread] does is look at the negative space, and these [rubbings] are effectively positives… a terminology which ties in neatly with sculpture, but also photography.” Where Whiteread casts absence and Bucher peels architectural skins, Faulkner’s silvered impressions occupy a different register, one rooted in photographic chemistry and time-based transformation rather than mould or membrane. 

Faulkner’s sense of material memory finds a parallel in his recent reading of Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino’s fractured 1972 meditation on urban life, where each imagined city is less a fixed place than a set of rhythms, circulations and repetitions. Calvino’s cities are defined by flows – of water, people, waste, information, and by the way those flows sediment into structure. Something similar happens in ‘Strong Water’.

The multi-panel photograph made at a metal-recycling facility in Cremona, Italy, doesn’t just depict the offcuts of  industry; it registers the fluctuating power of the electrical grid powering the enlarger. This is seen in subtle  tonal shifts that record the city’s shifting demand and release of energy. Like Calvino’s cities, Faulkner’s works become attuned to an underlying heartbeat: the invisible systems that animate space and bind bodies, machines and materials together. Photography, here, is less an image than a diagnostic tool – a way of making those circulations momentarily visible before they dissolve back into the wider metabolism of the world.

The exhibition closes on a quieter but no less charged note with Faulkner’s work around the peppered moth – a species that became emblematic of what he calls “an accelerated version of natural selection” during the Industrial Revolution. As factory soot darkened trees, the moth’s lighter form became newly visible to predators, while a darker, melanic variant thrived, its survival hinging on contrast, exposure and concealment. “That event felt like it also had a photographic starting point, in terms of the kind of exposure and contrast,” notes Faulkner. “It’s similar to the timeframe of silver tarnishing and it’s white to black as well, so it has this kind of positive, negative thing.” The accompanying photograph of the moth trap, taken while catching the specimen used to produce the work, extends this logic further, folding the act of capture, exposure and delay into the image itself. What’s allowed to appear, what slips back into obscurity, and under what circumstances an image persists or disappears altogether.

That preoccupation carries through ‘Strong Water’ more broadly. The exhibition’s opening room, stained a bruised orange with an installation that filters daylight through shallow pools of liquid iodine set into the skylight, is another example. Light – photography’s primary agent – is no longer an invisible certainty but something dense, coloured and active, felt on the body as much as registered by the eye. Iodine carries its own history: once derived from seaweed and used to sensitise silvered copper plates for early daguerreotypes, it sits at the threshold between exposure and image, chemistry and perception.

Its medical use as a disinfectant adds another register, hinting at vulnerability and care, the body as a photosensitive surface. Like the tarnishing silver and the evolving moth, the iodine insists on duration rather than resolution. Its colour shifts with the day, the weather, the angle of the sun; nothing is fixed, nothing fully stabilised. This open-endedness is central to Faulkner’s thinking. “There’s something interesting,” he notes, “about output that is not measured by progress… or something that can be reproduced and monetised again and again.” ‘Strong Water’ resists finality in precisely this way, unfolding as a set of conditions rather than a sequence of completed works. What Faulkner ultimately foregrounds is not the image as a product, but photography as a living system, one that absorbs environments, histories and bodies, and remains perpetually open to change.