Studio Kliché

Tecnica: Cyanotype print on toilet paper, contact printed from a photographic negative using UV light exposure.

Anno: 2026

Dimensione: 11 x 27 cm

Descrizione: After nearly two years of trying to conceive, my first pregnancy brought hope during a period marked by personal and collective uncertainty. At 18.5 weeks pregnant, without warning, I began to bleed heavily. At the hospital, I learned that my placenta had partially detached. Although my baby was still alive and there remained hope that the pregnancy could continue, I was diagnosed with a “threatened abortion” and prescribed bed rest. One week later, I lost the pregnancy.
This cyanotype records that fleeting and irreversible moment: the first bleeding, one week before the loss. Printed on toilet paper—a material designed for use and disappearance—the image transforms an intimate bodily trace into a fragile artifact of memory.
Driven by light and time, the cyanotype process becomes both witness and narrator. Light fixes what the body could not hold, preserving an absence through its imprint. The delicate fibers of the paper absorb the image much as memory absorbs grief: imperfectly, unevenly, leaving gaps and dissolving edges.
The material itself introduced a parallel tension. Toilet paper is inherently unstable; each stage of coating, washing, and handling risked its disintegration. The effort to preserve the image echoed an earlier, impossible effort to hold onto the pregnancy. In both instances, fragility became palpable and preservation remained uncertain.
Situated between biology and photographic process, the work joins a bodily event with a medium rooted in chemistry and sunlight. What remains is not a document of loss, but its trace—a fragile record of a body, a moment, and a life already beginning to recede from view.