'Field Notes'

The Photographer’s Eye Gallery will present “Field Notes,” a collection of works by Oriana Poindexter, a marine scientist and photographer who creates images from kelp and other sea specimens she draws from the ocean.

“I started photographing underwater with a 35-millimeter film camera,” Poindexter said. “Initially I was excited about what I was getting, but what I was really missing was what had originally gotten me interested in photography, which was the tactile printmaking process and the way you could translate an image from nature into this physical object.”

The Photographer's Eye Gallery

Poindexter has a B.A. from Princeton University in Visual Arts and an M.A.S. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD in Marine Biodiversity & Conservation, so it was natural for her to blend these two disciplines.

After experiencing frustration with her attempts with negative film, Poindexter turned to the cyanotype process. Poindexter creates her art by laying marine objects like kelp on light-sensitive paper and exposing them to the sun. This creates an impression of the object on the paper, like a shadow, resulting in a cyanotype. Cyanotypes typically have a blue hue but can display a different color depending on the chemical used to treat the paper.

“Once I realized I could do direct contact printing with materials I pulled out of the water, I could use that and combine all the things I had found exciting, like going out and searching and collecting, and then making these hand based physical objects that were able to translate both the scale and the detail of the giant kelp,” she said.

Some of Poindexter’s prints are 17 feet long, which are created on fabric, such as silk or canvas. The longest image for The Photographer’s Eye exhibit is 80 inches.

The Photographer's Eye Gallery

Poindexter, who lives in San Diego, has been camping and diving at Catalina Island for fifteen years, and much of her work springs from those waters. Also represented in “Field Notes” are works created during a summer immersed in Oregon’s coastal ecosystems.

Poindexter’s photography has been featured in The Smithsonian magazine, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and has been shown at Laguna Art Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, and Center for Fine Art Photography.

Poindexter will present an artist talk at the gallery on July 11, at 4 p.m., which will be followed immediately by a reception. She will conduct a workshop on making cyanotypes on July 12, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For information and to sign up, contact the gallery at 760-522-2170.

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