THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY, July 9, 2008
Sheer Bliss — Colin Pantell (excerpts)

The gossamer quality of nylon stockings and hairnets is at the core of Elaine Duigenan's fascinating photograms. Colin Pantell talks to her about her work, and how she was discovered by a New York gallery at Rhubarb-Rhubarb.

"I started doing photograms through pure experimentation," says Elaine Duigenan. "The first thing I scanned was an old hairnet and it felt like I had discovered something new and exciting, something that lent itself well to the work that I was doing." These early experiments by the London-based photographer led to more detailed photograms of archaic women's wear, work that will be on show in Duigenan's Intimate Archaeology exhibition running at Klompching Gallery in New York from 10 July until 29 August.

"After I scanned the hairnet, I did the Nylons series," says Duigenan. "I began collecting them, starting with vintage stockings by Dior and going through to more contemporary versions. Collecting and discovering nylons in unlikely places was part of my passion for the process."

"It's like finding by accident because nylons are objects of beauty and oddness. They are functional, but they are also flirty, sexy things, and they are fetish objects. I was interested in the delicacy of the stockings, the way you could see individual threads pulling away. The nylons are both there and not there, fragile items that are incredibly intricate and can unravel so easily, but with a texture that has an almost sculptural quality. They connect on many levels, so people react in different ways and bring their own connections to them."

"After completing her Nylons series, Duigenan returned to photographing hairnets, partly because she also wanted to collect them. Drawn by the strangeness of the items, and the fact that some older hairnets are made from human hair, duigenan found her curiosity piqued. She also found that the organic nature of the hairnets revealed a darker, forensic side that found a resonance with some of her earlier work. This darkness carried over to Duigenan's hairnets, where the mystery was compounded by her arrangements of the nets on the scanner, arrangements that, given the hairnets' flexible nature, are only partial at best. Indeed Duigenan's hairnets almost take on a life of their own. They tend to spring back from their orderly arrangements and weave shapes that emerge from their organic architecture. Look at them long enough and they become a photographic Rorschach test — one image depicts a seahorse, another a pair of knickers or a jellyfish, or whatever the depths of the viewer's psyche decides it to be.

The luxuriant quality of the prints, and finding opportunities to show them to gallerists and publishers, has played a large part in Duigenan's burgeoning career. For her, the most effective places to show work and network are review events, especially Rhubarb-Rhubarb, where she met both Debra Klomp Ching and Darren Ching (owners of the Klompching Gallery).

" ... I had a three-line email from Debra last year asking if I would like representation, and I said yes, and now I have my first New York show, something I am obviously delighted about."