THE LIVING TRACE
PHOTO LONDON 2026, Booth J13, Discovery Section, Olympia,
London 13 May – 17 May 2026
A curated presentation of works by artists Edward Rollitt and Carolina Baldomá
Victoria Law Projects presents The Living Trace, a booth in the Discovery Section of Photo London 2026 bringing together work by British artist Edward Rollitt and Argentine visual artist Carolina Baldomá. Though operating in entirely different registers, Rollitt constructing psychologically charged interiors in rural Hampshire and Baldomá making cyanotypes in elemental collaboration with the Argentine Pampas, both practices are animated by the same understanding: that matter carries memory, and that what a photograph records is not just what was in front of the camera, but what passed between the maker and their materials.
Edward Rollitt works at the intersection of sculpture and photography, assembling installations from antique furniture, decayed textiles, soil, and accumulated domestic possessions. Each work begins from a method-acted character study: a fictional figure whose world is built from objects. The Reverend Lovelace Bigg-Wither moves into strange territory, where tree trunks, feathers, and a bed combine in an image whose boundaries dissolve: between inside and outside, real and mythic, sanctuary and forest. Lady Wimmering turns the same unflinching gaze onto the human body, its pale form caught in the half-light with the stillness of a relic, flesh treated with the same reverence Rollitt extends to decayed textiles and worn leather. Alfred Smee Prunes His Roses, in which a chicken picks its way across a laid table among scattered petals and cut stems, operates as an extraordinary still life, charged with the same quality of arrested time one finds in Dutch Golden Age painting.
Alongside these larger works, Rollitt will show a group of smaller pieces that bring the same focus to bear on individual objects: The Gloves, leather once intimate with long-dead wearers; Buttercup, a single flower curled in on itself in the dark; and Prunella Quincy, with its light falling on crockery with the stillness of a Vermeer. Together, these works span three years of practice and are accompanied in the booth by a 16th-century trunk, feathers at its base, with a pair of 18th-century vicar's shoes nearby: the installation extending the photographic world from the walls into the room itself.
Edward Rollitt, Alfred Smee Prunes His Roses, 2024. C-type print.Carolina Baldomá collaborates directly with natural processes, working with cyanotype, anthotype, and chlorophyll prints to produce images within the landscape itself. Her series On The Path To Shizen presents cyanotypes on Japanese washi paper responding to and reconstructing the fragile ecosystems of the Argentine Pampas, a terrain whose apparent flatness and emptiness contains extraordinary ecological complexity. Each piece is exposed outdoors, developed by the sun, and rinsed with well water or rainwater. The result is an almost infinite range of Prussian blue tonalities, what Baldomá calls a sensitive code that echoes the essence of the territory. Intricate and kaleidoscopic, the polyptych format fragments and reconstructs the landscape simultaneously, producing works that function less as representations of nature than as records of a co-creation with it.
Her practice draws on a lineage of 19th-century women photographers and botanists, reframing their historical impulse to classify the natural world as a contemporary search for coexistence and synchronicity with it. The booth also presents a selection of works from her series I Was Once Between The Moon And The Sun, a narrative that brings a magical realism perspective to the cycles of women and nature.
Both photographers work through a process of direct physical engagement. Each work is the record of a poetic encounter: between objects, light, and the artist's hand in Rollitt's case; between paper, weather, and the wilderness in Baldomá's. Video works by both artists, selected for the Photo London Screening Room, offer an immersive record of those worlds in the making: Rollitt's drawing you into the tactile shadows of his dreamlike interiors; Baldomá's situating her practice within a contemporary land art tradition through its performative and site-specific dimensions, related to her series Impressions of Nature. Though working in opposite directions, one accumulating slowly over weeks, the other seizing a singular atmospheric event, both understand the image as something shaped by time and territory. As she has said of her process: "The humidity, the dew, the time of year, the seasons, the time of day - they all define the final result. It will never be the same because the environment is never the same. Every single day is different."
Text by Rosalind Jana
Carolina Baldomá, Untitled; from the series The Path to Shizen, 2025. Cyanotype on Japanese paper.SPECIAL EVENTS:
7 May, 18:00 – 20:00 – Evening conversation at VLP between Edward Rollitt and Brandei Estes. Set against works from the booth, the talk will offer an intimate insight into Edward's practice and the ideas behind The Living Trace. Light refreshments will be served. Places are limited, please RSVP HERE.
12 May, 18:00 – 21:00 – VLP is delighted to present an exhibition of works by Carolina Baldomá, hosted by Her Excellency Mariana Plaza, Argentine Ambassador to the United Kingdom, at her official residence. The exhibition will include a wider selection of works including video. Wine and empanadas will be served. Please RSVP HERE.
13 May, 15:30 – 16:30 – Victoria Law will be joining collector Rafaël Biosse Duplan and Dr. Madeleine Haddon, Senior Curator of the V&A East, in conversation moderated by cultural advisor and philanthropist Isabelle von Ribbentrop, as we explore collecting as a dialogue between people, ideas, and time. Please RSVP directly to vip@photolondon.org
15 May, 14:00 – 15:00 – Artist Talk and Guided Tour: Carolina Baldomá at Victoria Law Projects Booth J13, Photo London.
15-16 May, 15:00 – Musical performance: Edward Rollitt at Victoria Law Projects Booth J13, Photo London.
Between 13 May – 17 May – The Living Trace, Victoria Law Projects, Booth J13, Discovery Section | Olympia London.