Nat Faulkner interview | Strong water | Camden Art Centre, London

At the opening of his first public exhibition, Nat Faulkner, winner of the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze 2024, talks about his fascination for the darkroom, what attracts him in the analogue process, and how Londoners’ use of electricity influenced the outcome of his largest work in the exhibition. You enter Nat Faulkner’s exhibition at Camden Art Centre in London through a space filled with an orange light, glowing warmly even on the rainiest of days. Aperture functions like a giant, performing camera. A light-sensitive iodine solution filters the light from outside through the Victorian skylights, and, on our visit, it is raining, resulting in hundreds of tiny droplets sitting on the orange surface like perfect little bubbles. Faulkner likens the darkroom in his studio to a collaborator, influencing the outcome of a set-up that is directed by the artist, but never fully controlled. We are able to see that idea unfolding, here, the darkroom replaced by Camden Art Centre’s vaulted, glass roof. Working as an assistant to a sculptor who cast materials in moulds, Faulkner became intrigued by the process, and its elements of chance and surprise. Experimenting with different photographic processes developed since the invention of photography in the 19th century, most of Faulkner’s artistic input happens in the post-development stage. Faulkner’s work is about capturing the materiality of photography more than about capturing an image. A black-and-white multipanel photograph taken at a scrap facility in Italy, made using an analogue silver gelatin process, spans floor to ceiling in the adjacent room. Initially, the heap of soil looks like a landscape, but on a closer look bits of metal can be seen in it, so that metal becomes the subject and the medium of the work. Changing the exposure of his negative to suggest different times of the day, Faulkner also shows the tape used in the darkroom and his own enlarged fingerprint as part of the composition, like a photomontage of the very materials of photography themselves. The title Strong Water comes from aqua fortis, the Latin name for nitric acid, used in the photographic process of printing with wet plates and liquids, and references the artist’s fascination with alchemy and transformation. A small grey moth seems to fly into a white canvas, searching for the light, like an alter ego of the artist himself. A series of frottage sculptures lines the walls, made by rubbing the walls of the studio on to thin sheets of copper. Electroplated with silver from the waste products of NHS X-ray labs, it suggests the artist’s presence in the abstract. Faulkner is interested in visualising the ideas of photography – black and white, positive and negative, light and dark, exposure and concealment. The process becomes the image, or in some cases, the object. Nat Faulkner: Strong water Camden Art Centre, London 16 January – 22 March 2026 Interview by SABINE CASPARIE Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY