Artist Statement |  Last year cyanotypes caught my interest: nontoxic, brilliantly blue, and relatively unsensitive for a photosensitive chemistry, cyanotypes fascinated me with their history and their potential. For years I have been interested in making photographs whose exposures last longer than a few seconds, and cyanotypes provided me that opportunity. After prototyping through various designs of box cameras, I eventually built a 1’x2’x3’ camera that took seven-day-long negative photographs: the sun became a dark band in the sky, trees were skeletal white silhouettes. The size and duration of these photographs prompted new questions: How big could a camera get? Could it become as big as my house? Could I live inside a camera?

This line of questioning led me to “Cyanotype Kitchen,” a months-long project in which I made cyanotype-sensitized paper coverings for all the furniture and cabinetry in my kitchen. Those cyanotype-sensitized shells were papered over every surface in my kitchen and allowed to expose for three days while I lived in and moved about the kitchen. The result was a 1:1 paper replica of my kitchen that showed swaths of blue where the light had lingered in my space and white ghosts where quotidian objects cast their shadows.

Anna Van Voorhis gets her hands on everything. She works with textiles, plants, paper, wood, cyanotype, and performance, among other media. She is currently preoccupied with attempts to cultivate her green thumb. Anna received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Minnesota in 2019 and her BA in Studio Arts from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 2014. She has shown work at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in Minneapolis, the Junior Varsity Artist Collective in Chicago, IL, and the Art Loft Gallery in Madison, WI. She has also been an artist in residence at the Milchhof Atelier in Berlin, Germany. She currently resides in Minneapolis.