Publications

DAVID PENNY "SOFT FIELDS"

From 21 August to 11 October 2025, Maksla XO Gallery is pleased to present, for the first time as part of Latvia’s art scene, a solo exhibition “Soft Fields” by David Penny, a British photographic artist and researcher of light and image.
The exhibition was created by David Penny in collaboration with physicists from King’s College London during advanced research into nanomaterials; it has been supported by SODA at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Royal Society, and AN Artists Bursary (UK).
The presentation of the exhibition in Latvia is supported by Artglass by Groglass.

David Penny’s practice encompasses photography, moving image and sculptural installation, thinking expansively around photography, materiality, objects and their images. He redefines the boundaries of photography through a unique, cameraless technique that merges science and art. By bridging laboratory methods with artistic intuition David Penny offers a fresh and speculative perspective on photography and its relationship with material objects. His “cameraless” photographs, made entirely without the use of a camera, explore the environment of the scientific laboratory, the photographic darkroom and the studio as sites of experimentation, artistic research and discovery. Several abstract series were created by capturing light in a nanophotonics laboratory, without using a camera. By placing sheets of photographic film in or near the path of high-powered lasers travelling through a system designed for nanomaterials research, he produces unique photograms. In “Soft Fields”, these works are presented in multiple series, encompassing wall-mounted photographic pieces and installations featuring undulating photogram sculptures.
Black and white images from the series “Across Paths and Into Fields”,are made by tracing the trajectory of a laser as it is directed around a Raman spectroscopy system used for the characterisation of nanomaterials. The technique involves an “imaging” of materials through a graphical representation of their molecular structure, with highly energised light from the laser functioning to simultaneously transform and observe the form and composition of the material. Observing the agency of light at the same time as an image is made, moves away from the idea of the photograph as representation of something already existing. The photographic moment is less about copying what already is, and instead part of an extended process of becoming, being more speculative and productive. The images have a visual resemblance to early scientific research, where outcomes of experiments were fixed and registered. Immaterial phenomena, which might have previously only been describable by words, or observed fleetingly, could be made tangible and measurable.
Abstract works from the series “Registrations”, which migrate the use of the laser from the laboratory to the photographic studio. Unfolding from an initial, exploratory question – what happens when making a photograph using a single wavelength of light? – a set of experiments reveal a gap between a theoretical idea and the unexpected results occurring when matter, materials, and the body come into play through practice. Photograms have been produced which record the space around an object, compressing its depth the into the surface of colour photographic paper, through a slow accumulation of the laser across the space of the studio. As opposed to the light cast from the darkroom enlarger, here light is pointedly targeted, with photographic exposure built up – or “painted in” – over time, an image created through multiple instances of shadowing.
Wave-like sculptural works oscillate across the exhibition space floor in the series “Accidents Happen” refers to the care and precision required when using photographic materials and the inevitable mistakes and occasional serendipity that can occur from the necessity of working in the dark. While stored on a large roll of paper stock, these sheets were unintentionally exposed. The resulting furls capture the interplay between that burst of light and further intentional gestural laser strokes, which move across and through the cylindrical roll’s three-dimensional form. Form, material, and light become embedded in the surface of the photographic paper, then re-presented within the gallery space.
In “Diagrams” – the completed, composite “shadow” image becomes visible only through the photographic process. The series incorporates handmade glass pins, used both in the creation and display of each work. Inspired by the push-pin – a small but significant element in the history of photographic technologies – David Penny researched and created handmade glass pins. These tools of production appear also to have imaged themselves: the push-pins and overlaid sheets of photographic paper have been inadvertently registered and condensed into each unique piece of work.
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