Perhaps the aspect of Rokeby I found most fascinating
of all is the lucky fact that the homestead went directly
from the hands of the family to being a museum. As
a result, the archives of Rokeby are phenomenal. They
contain nearly 200 years of the Robinsons’ family life,
including furniture, clothing, books, paintings, an
incredible photographic archive, more than 15,000
letters, as well as nine different surviving buildings.
Under the leadership of visiting contemporary art
curator Ric Kasini Kadour, the museum has recently
embarked on a fascinating new project entitled Con-
temporary Art at Rokeby Museum. Artists are being
invited to make artwork at or about the Rokeby, in
conjunction with a series of related talks, exhibits and
workshops. The first of these is Rokeby Through the
Lens, an exhibit which combines photographs from the
museum’s extensive archive with photographic
artworks made by contemporary artists.
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My husband and I ultimately created the largest
artwork my husband has ever made: a monumental
30 feet! Lately, Steve has been using what are known
as panning-lens cameras, in which the lens actually
moves across the film plane during the exposure. The
result is a 140 degree angle of view that mimics human
vision. In addition, he employs an overlapping expo-
sure technique that allows him to collage a series of im-
ages together, in-camera, as he goes, on film. This re-
sults in some pretty fantastic negatives: the negative for
Rokeby spans the entire length of a 120 roll of film: 28
inches long. The image is made as a unique one-of-one
print on my husband’s Da Vinci printer, the only one
of its kind. Steve is fascinated by beautiful handmade
papers from around the world - so much so that he
invented a way to print on them. For the Rokeby piece
he chose a stunning Japanese Haruki Unryu-shi, which
translates to “cloud dragon paper.”