Of the 17,098 photos on my iPhone (as of 22/7/2026), 447 appear when I enter the word “sculpture” into the Photos app search function. The results are not perfect – some images are not in fact sculptures – but it is fairly accurate.

I can’t remember exactly why I first typed the word in to search. Maybe I was looking for a reference image. Whatever the reason, it sparked an idea to generate works using only the categorised images.

The images were first printed in black and white onto normal photocopy paper, which was in turn oiled to create a paper negative. This was then transferred via light onto a photo-sensitive gelatin silver paper, and finally processed in chemicals, create what is referred to as a ‘contact’ print. This darkroom process reverses the images both back to front and also from positive to negative. They look uncanny, in the true sense of the word: familiar and strange. There is a degradation that occurs in these processes, but also an emergence of an actual physical materiality – they become objects.
The images were not taken with the idea of ‘making a work’, they lacked any intention of 'being art', which makes them somehow more interesting to me.
Of course, sculpture and photography have been bedfellows since the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. Among the earliest known photographs are images of sculptures, perhaps because the long exposure times required by early cameras made immobile objects ideal subjects. Photography, in a way, learned to look at sculpture first - rehearsing its earliest experiments in light, shadow and form on objects that stayed still.
Luke Parker, artist statement, 2026