Inebriate Blue: Cyanotype as Queer Method
in the plupresent of fear and ecstasy
in the simple present of our intelligent issues
anon a landscape that rises like an ancient beast flexible from throat to sex capable of flight and
sudden plunges of inebriate blue,
—Nicole Brossard, “Ultrasound”1Nicole Brossard, “Ultrasound,” in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, ed. Sina Queyras, Genevieve Robichaud, and Erin Wunker, trans. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure (Coach House Books, 2020), 50.
Drowned in blue. Drunk on blue. The colour of calm, of melancholy, of depth and distance, of purity and perversion.2Angela Chalmers, Creative Cyanotype: Techniques and Inspiration (The Crowood Press, 2023), 12–13. “We love to contemplate blue,” Goethe wrote in his Theory of Colours, “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.”3Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (MIT Press, 1970), 311. Let us be drawn. Let us touch. Let’s make memory, make refusal, make care, make giddy joy, make queerness visible.
More than a century after cyanotypes were first introduced, Wendy Simon began her career as an artist. Her practice included photo-etchings, woodcuts, and artist’s books, and works such as Bee-Harmonics (1990), a series of etchings depicting the life of a bee, and L’ortie bleuit (1996), an apparent meditation on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.4“Bee-Harmonics | Ottawa Art Gallery,” Ottawa Art Gallery, October 27, 2021, Web. A copy of L’ortie bleuit is kept in the special collections of the Toronto Reference Library. Her 2001 exhibition, Pears/Poires, included more than seventy pieces dedicated to the subject.5Laura Arseneau, “Taste of Grimsby: Artists’ Works Capture the Spirit of Ontario’s Ripe Fruit Belt: Toronto Edition,” National Post, August 25, 2001. “Pears have been used in still life for centuries,” she told a reporter. “Though many artists have made reference to the female form, I was intrigued with the pear because it was always available and because it is so simple. The more I look, the more I seem to find.” 6Quoted in Arseneau. While many of her works were donated to Université Laval following her death in 2002, her cyanotype, Pear Around (2001), is part of the permanent collection at the Agnes.7For more information on the donation to Université Laval, see Le Soleil, October 30, 2004, D7. At Queen’s University, the student research archive for the master’s degree in art conservation notes Sarah Duffy’s work, “A Technical Examination of Three Photo-Transfer Prints by Wendy Simon,” (2017–2018), which analyzed three of Simon’s prints and determined that Pear Around is a cyanotype. “Student Research | Art History and Art Conservation,” Queen’s University Department of Art History & Art Conservation, accessed June 18, 2025. Web.
Pear Around contains depths of faded, Prussian blue depicting eleven pieces of fruit, stems and peels as abstractions of flesh. One could imagine pairs of ample breasts or two rows of gapped and crooked teeth. A red line is drawn in crayon, threaded among the fruit. When I look at Pear Around, I see an idea and an actuality, a between and a beyond, the past and the present, human and more-than-human, touch and desire. Traces of a body, made in the stillness required to confirm the shape of the fruit. Pomes with an extant core protected by lush flesh and a leathery exterior. Hearty and soft. They seem to be drawn to each other, searching for protection together. Within this circle there is what was and there is something else—what is. It is familiar but not completely known. Despite the title, the pears can never be fully apprehended or read as pears—there is always something missing. It is both still life and the nude. There is a sense of delight, a sense of kinship with what is both one thing and something else. Pears but also breasts, teeth. The chemistry that fixed these figures has not changed, but there remains always the possibility for another layer, another becoming. This is not only a medium but a form of media. It is an invitation to imagine. Cyanotype is one of the oldest photographic methods: an emulsion of iron salts, water, and sunlight makes the “deep blue” for which the monochromatic images are named.8See Angela Chalmers, Creative Cyanotype: Techniques and Inspiration (The Crowood Press, 2023), 12–13, and Anne E. Havinga, “Cyanotype Photography,” in Blue: Cobalt to Cerulean in Art and Culture (Chronicle Books, 2015), 146. It entered the popular imagination when the first book of photographs, Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, was published in 1843.9Chalmers, 11. Papers that have been treated with a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide become sensitive to UV light. After placing algae on top of these papers and leaving them in the sun, they could be washed to a permanent blue, made deeper by time and the intensity of the exposure. By working “to obtain impressions of plants themselves,” or “shadowgraphs” as she called them, Atkins acted as a collaborator in the artistic process.10See: Anna Atkins, “Introduction,” Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843), n.p. as quoted in “Anna Atkins,” MoMA, Web; Likewise, Zeva Oelbaum writes of Atkin’s use of the term “shadowgraphs” in Blue Prints – Zeva Oelbaum: The Natural World in Cyanotype Photographs (Rizzoli, 2002), 10. As Paige Hirschey writes in her essay, “Rhapsodies in Blue: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes,”
this authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’ work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world . . . While the Enlightenment vision of nature—and the illustrational conventions it produced—supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently captured by a fixed natural order.11Paige Hirschey, “Rhapsodies in Blue: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes,” The Public Domain Review, accessed October 26, 2024, Web.
Cyanotype is a queer method. Queer: fluid, precarious, an interruption—as Catriona Sandilands writes in “Into This Blue: Betsy Warland’s Queer Ecopoetics”. Queer holds openness, vulnerability and affinity, materialities and affects layered in vibrant negativity.12Catriona Sandilands, “Into This Blue: Betsy Warland’s Queer Ecopoetics,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 1 (May 1, 2018): 188, 197–198, Web. Method: the cyanotype is an obstruction, a “negative shadow.” 13Chalmers, 9. Tones of blue reveal desire, uncertainty, fragility. Sandilands describes this queer blue:
Blue is the compassion that derives from loss, and the networks of care that may spring from the experience: not hearty, organic, muscular, progressive solidarity. Blue is a recognition of fragility, vulnerability, and precarious, ecological enmeshedness in the world. Blue is a political form that does not rush to positivity but instead lingers in critique for long enough to question the necessity and temporality of growth and expansion.14Sandilands, 198.
This is the blue of cyanotype: a queer blue. A blue made from traces and layers. A collapse and expansion—a breath. The cyanotype carries an intimacy, through physical touch between surface and subject. This contact is necessary to create the obstruction—the refusal—needed for care. Each layer is a possibility of documentation, of abstraction. What is concealed or revealed is confirmed in the collaboration between an artist and their materials. It is an archive of sensation between the human and more-than-human. The cyanotype is malleable in its making, inviting experimentation into the very definitions of a photograph and expanding the processes that determine how one is made.
The qualities so inherent in cyanotype and visualized in Pear Around are more purposefully explored within contemporary art. Queer artists are engaging with cyanotype to document and express, to unmake, make, and remake queerness. For example, interdisciplinary artist Lou Sheppard’s Crepuscular Rhythms (2019–) is an ongoing performance score that visualizes dawn and dusk as queer moments of the day. Sheppard leads queer and trans participants wearing treated T-shirts on an hour-long walk, guiding them through performances in Brooklyn, Zagreb, Tallinn, Dublin Shore and Regina. The washed fabrics are then displayed as graphic scores, and the blues become notations of gesture, feeling, and (il)legibility.15For documentation and descriptions of the performance, see “Crepuscular Rhythms,” lou sheppard, accessed June 18, 2025, Web and “Queer City Cinema,” accessed June 18, 2025, Web. He described the project in C Magazine:
Slipping through the streets, half-light giving cover to non-normative bodies, non-normative desires. When we can’t be named, can we still be seen? A long exposure, visible to those who can see in the dark—a gaze held too long, returning a blurred trace—the material of our bodies pulling back together, an irresistible gravity.16Lou Sheppard, “Composition: Crepuscular Rhythms,” C Magazine, accessed June 18, 2025, Web.
Working across sound, performance, and installation, Sheppard often explores embodiment, ecology, and epistemology in his work, questioning how narratives can be blurred and disrupted. With Crepuscular Rhythms, he has extended the possibilities of collaboration with cyanotype, queering relations between media, artist and spectator.17As part of his work with C Magazine, unexposed cyanotypes were included with 500 issues of the magazine, and the recipients were invited to create and share their own cyanotypes.
Likewise, Cassils’ Human Measure is another kind of marking, a dance performance in which trans and nonbinary performers created and developed a large-scale cyanotype onstage in real time. Sitting in the low red light of the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto, one evening in 2022, I was lulled into an intimacy with the dancers, their movements were in turn tender and pulsating—a frantic disjointedness, a synchronized eroticism. I was also forced to close my eyes by periodic flashes of white, pained, feeling a gaze upon me. The time it took to create the work in the theatre met the urgency of the outside world. “We’re living in a world where actually there’s . . . a political system that’s trying to actively erase you,” Cassils has said. “And yet you’re still trying to be a person that’s coming into your power, into your presence, into your sensuality . . . how do you hold those two lived experiences?”18Hannah Draper, “Human Measure Gives Space to Trans Bodies | Interview with Cassils & Jasmine Albuquerque,” dance art journal, December 9, 2021, Web. Each evening’s performance became an archive of varied physicality and communal resistance.
My desire for (il)legibility, for intimacy, has led me to iron and water and light, led me to layer upon layer, led me to Pear Around. I wanted to read the work as form, to think about how we might queer the ways in which we make art. Pear Around delights in the practicalities and possibilities of cyanotype. The simplicity and the restrictions with which one can create are what invite us to look again. Cyanotype is a queer method. It is a conversation, words said and unsaid. Listen. It is a tender spot where our bodies touched—we were here. It is memory. It is laughter. It is community. It is protest. It is there and not there. It is an undoing of what has been, of what might be, of who we are. It is a witnessing, an invitation to see queerness and an invitation to imagine what queerness will be.