One day I woke up as a tree!

A cyanotype workshop was conducted for Artreach India’s Artroom students by the artist, Sonam Chaturvedi at Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi on 11 May 2024. We had 26 Artroom participants within the age group of 14 to 17 in a hall that was turned into a dark room by sealing off the windows. We started with warm-up exercises followed by a presentation on Cyanotype alternative photography method, showing examples and the stepwise process. Sonam demonstrated the process in the dark room, showing how to mix the chemicals, their application on paper, making a composition using foraged flowers and leaves. The chemical-soaked sheet with the composition was taken in the sunlight, left for 10 minutes to expose; it was then brought back inside the dark room to wash and dry. This process captivated the students as they stared in awe at the magically appearing silhouettes of the objects standing out in a dark blue background.

The students were then divided into pairs and made a single print between them to try out and learn the process. They were then given the theme of ‘One day I woke up as a tree!’ and asked to make themselves as an imagined tree using flowers, leaves, feathers and cut outs brought by Sonam or picked/made by the students. As they took turns in composing their images, applying the chemical, re-composing on the paper and taking them out in the sunlight to take the prints, others were asked to illustrate the steps of Cyanotype printmaking.

At the end of the workshop, after all the prints were done and displayed by pinning them on cloth lines, we all sat in a circle to look at each work and reflect on the idea as well as the process. The students were very excited and delighted to talk about their ideas— some had made trees wearing frocks, some made sister-trees depicting their friends in the room, while some made imaginative hybrids with animal-human-tree forms that looked like characters from a dreamland or another world.