What’s Included
All of the Materials: Participants will receive all the tools to create a beautiful cyanotype.
A Moment for Meditation: Elaine will provide prompts that encourage participants to recall a moment they’d like to create a portal to which to return.
Elaine’s Guidance: The artist will assist everyone in an encouraging, creative atmosphere.
What to Bring
A beginner’s mindset and readiness to get hands on.
Any Inquiries?
Please contact info@fouronenine.com
What Exactly Is Portals to the Past?
This participatory art project invites participants to create a portal in time by transforming memory into image through cyanotypes.
Using found objects, gestures, and arrangements on fabric, participants shape remembered light, exposing them onto bedsheets and linens—fabrics that symbolize the domestic, intimate spaces where memories often reside or become buried.
The resulting works are emotional imprints of the past, blurry, abstract, and deeply personal portals.
Elaine Nguyen
@elainetnguyen
Elaine Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary artist exploring the fluidity of identity and the search for home. Utilizing cyanotypes and long exposures she seeks to capture a specific moment while also acknowledging the blurriness that comes with memory and its lack of permanence. Interested in the emotive aspect of immersion in water or sky, she utilizes blue to convey a sense of yearning and seeking. Her works are portals, imagined passage through physical spaces to re-enter places in time.