Ida Anderson lived in Moscow for twenty years before leaving after Russia's war against Ukraine and relocating to Montenegro, drawn to the Adriatic coast's healing blue. She created Blue Valentines, a photography and print project that uses cyanotypes as a love letter to identity, migration and fractal communication. She mailed postcards to friends who also left Russia; the postcards accumulated stamps and tangible traces during transit and influenced the work. The cyanotype process highlights negative space and watery ripples, portraying lovers, rainbows, snowy landscapes, construction and bird wings. The hands-on technique leaves corporeal traces and conveys loss, melancholy and sensual awkwardness.
"I found something deeply healing about the Adriatic coast after everything that happened," says Ida. That same healing blue is the colour that dominates her new photography and print project Blue Valentines, a love letter to identity, migration and fractal communication through cyanotypes. "Photography, because of its widespread availability, reproducibility, and omnipresence, carries a powerful communicative potential," says Ida. "In that sense, it acts almost like the perfect migrant - a medium that can be sent anywhere across the globe, continually transforming along the way."
After starting Blue Valentines, Ida began sending postcards to friends who had also left Russia. As these postcards travelled through various postal systems, their surfaces gradually accumulated stamps and tangible traces of the journeys. This achieved Ida's aim of creating emotional photography that reveals subjective mental spaces, rather than neutrality. Ida's evocative and sensitive print project mirrors the emotional makeup of those postcards. "I'm fascinated by exploring contemporary sensuality in general, especially its shady awkward sides," says Ida.
Ida's photographic eye captures water streams that become ripples in the print itself - as well as lovers kissing in a shady blue, rainbows rendered colourless, snowy landscapes, construction and bird wings. "The cyanotype process is simple yet demands a hands-on, human touch, which makes the photograph deeply personal," says Ida. "I'm drawn to that trace of corporeality left on the image. And of course, cyanotype is one of the accurate ways to convey the emotional state of loss and melanc
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