Nat Faulkner - 1:1

Published on the occasion of Nat Faulkner's exhibition Strong water at Camden Art Centre, 16 January 2026/22 March 2026. A direct product of the artist's studio, 1:1 is a publication that sits in dialogue with the exhibition's core themes. 1:1 presents an extensive series of hand-produced contact prints by the artist, derived from a single large format image taken by Faulkner of a peppered moth (Biston betularia) - a widely studied example of 'industrial melanism'. During the Industrial Revolution soot from factories darkened the bark of trees and through a process of natural selection the lighter form of this moth, once well-camouflaged, became more visible to predators and its numbers diminished. Meanwhile, a darker (melanic) variant became more common, due to being better camouflaged against the soot darkened trees. This phenomena, the artist has observed, holds resonances with the processes of photography itself - in the production of positive and negative images. Through the pages of this publication, the image of the moth both alternates between its positive and negative versions and gradually progresses from a sharp detailed image towards abstraction as the original image 'degrades' with each repetition. The publication also includes two essays, from Gloria Hasnay (Director of Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf) and artist Sean Steadman.