Isa Marcelli – Untitled from Toccata series (2015-16)

In music, toccata means literally ‘light touch’ and is a designation afforded to a pieces (usually keyboard based but also sometimes including string instruments) which are notoriously difficult to perform but allow the musician to show off their deftly virtuositic lightness of touch.

With the image above, there are several layers of meaning to draw from this. First that the woman is holding an egg resonates with the title. (And I can’t help but recall the apocryphal account of Brunelleschi carrying a basket of eggs and dropping them as a result of his shock upon encountering Masaccio’s Holy Trinity Fresco.) Secondly, Marcelli is using collodion to produce ferrotypes. (Collodion wet plates experienced their widest usage during the U.S. Civil War–during which time collodion was actually used to close up severe wounds; but through a process involving a number of extremely hazardous chemicals, i.e. ether and cyanide, it was possible to produce a resilient negative image on transparent glass.) Also: collodion is not exactly the most user friendly format as you have roughly 12 minutes to evenly coat the plate, load it into your camera, expose and process the resulting image.