Marina Grize on
Divine icons roam as lens
Divine icons roam as lens
Sweetwater Gallery
March 5, 2026 through to April 18, 2026
Leipziger Straße 56-58, Berlin, Germany
Paying homage to lesbian communities in San Francisco during the 1980s, artist Marina Grize layers traces from the urban landscape with photographic images sourced from issues of the iconic lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs between 1984 and 1989.
I’ve read that the series originates from your time at the San Francisco Public Library during the summer of 2025. Can you describe your initial encounter with On Our Backs, and what drew you to return to it as the foundation for this body of work?
On Our Backs was still in publication when I was coming of age, though I can't recall exactly when I first encountered it. I've long collected feminist and queer periodicals, but lesbian ephemera is harder to find and access. About a decade ago I became seriously invested in learning more about a lesbian art history — photographers like Tee Corinne, JEB, Honey Lee Cottrell — and it was probably around then that I started seeking out issues of On Our Backs. What struck me about the magazine wasn't primarily its eroticism, though that's inseparable from what it is. It's that these women were making images of themselves under specific conditions.
I was living in San Francisco during the summer of 2025. I knew the library had a significant holding of the magazine, as it was originally published there. I was also reading the 25th anniversary edition of Valencia by Michelle Tea and walking the Mission nearly every day. There is a huge distance between my own accumulated experiences of San Francisco and the world Tea was articulating, and a political gap between her experiences of the city and the early days of On Our Backs. Yet, this was a stretching back through histories happening within my lifetime. These activities started to fold into each other, the physical act of looking for what remains in a neighborhood, the photocopying of the magazine.
I had just ended Bathers, a project I'd worked on for nearly five years. That project is photographs taken from cinematic fiction, from lesbian representation as it has been imagined, speculated, and constructed in film. The scenes haven't happened in the sense that they describe a world that doesn't fully exist—women existing only in relation to other women. The memory there is prospective. The inquiries that led to Divine Icons inverts this idea. Here, I am culling from something that did happen, women making themselves in their own image, exercising ownership over how they were seen, building a community through print culture and physical space. And yet that history is now almost illegible. It was never fully legible to begin with, and its disappearance is partly a function of having been treated as non-eventful. I’m interested in what that can look like, materially.
Obscuring imagery through a framework of physical manipulation, such as through photocopying, cropping and cast framing, Divine Icons Roam as Lens reimagines the archive of On Our Backs. Do you see process as inseparable from the final works, or something separate entirely?
The material processes are inseparable from what this work is, it is more of a response to a precarious history, to a memory. The printing and metal casting are methods of impression. These images have been through something, and the photocopy makes that visible. Every generation of copying introduces loss and a compounding obscurity. The photographs, made through contact printing, are records of contact with the surface. A process of reversal is to reveal a positive image. The cast frames work within the same logic…they're not representations of Valencia Street, they're records of contact with it. The fragmented image is given the treatment of a keepsake, a relic. You cannot hold the photograph without holding the impression of the street and you cannot read the street without the erotic fragment at its center.
I'm extracting from a collective form—the magazine, its grid, its editorial intent, even its community of readers. There's a bit of loss and melancholy in that. But the fragment, or dilation of a moment, has a different relationship to time and chance than the scroll or the feed, the archive or the institute, where you may encounter these images whole.
I love this question. I’ll start by saying the archive is itself an incomplete construction, shaped just as much by what has been omitted or left out as by the materials it holds. There are a few artists that I admire who are doing the work of creating an almost ad-hoc archive, fully legible, through exposure, accumulation, and public address. But I identify with the idea stated, “to stretch what an image can hold, and what it can refuse;” an image can hold more time than it depicts and it can materially hold touch. Some photographs in this series are present but hidden, where no amount of looking can penetrate. So the hold and refuse aren’t oppositional.
The photographs as they appear in On Our Backs were never intended for all audiences. Obfuscation in the work is both a conceptual choice and a preservation of the original conditions of the magazine's circulation, its intimacy, its assumption of a particular reader. The two primary sources, On Our Backs and Valencia Street, are linked through place, time, and a shared project of lesbian sexual and cultural visibility, but, as mentioned earlier, neither is publicly apparent today. The title of the show Divine icons roam as lens is a near-anagram of Valencia in Mission Dolores. An anagram felt structurally true to the history I was working with. Terry Castle's concept of the "apparitional" lesbian describes a figure who has been made to not-quite-appear in Western cultural representation, present only as rumor, as shadow, as implication. The history is there but it requires a particular kind of attention to see.
Divine icons roam as lens is beautifully tactile, visceral and abstract. Where do you find the balance between narrative and emotion?
Thank you. The works carry narratives from specific dates, named publications, real women, particular streets, a documented community, a traceable history of censorship and gentrification. The title alone encodes a geography. At the same time, the narrative is structural to the end piece, perhaps in the way a photo negative is to the photograph, but I’m almost entirely withholding that from the visual surface of the work. I try to push the image away from representation towards a feeling. Can images feel like a memory? Not a specific memory with a beginning and end. I hope the result is that the works ask to be felt before they are read, and then, once you begin to read them, ask to be felt differently.
James John Midwinter on
Fragrant River, Flowing Field
Fragrant River, Flowing Field
Could you share some context about your journey from Kagawa to Nagano: when it took place, how long it lasted, and how you experienced it?
It was a three week trip in October 2023, something my partner and I had desired for a long time. It was actually a round trip, from Osaka, through Kagawa, then to Nagano, Kyoto and back to Osaka, but Kagawa and Nagano, were the most westerly and easterly places we visited, and I liked the translations of their names, so I used some artistic licence for the name of the book.
It's impossible to sum up our experience, it was so rich and varied. It felt like we learned a lot while there, but at the same time only saw a sliver of the culture and country. There were a lot of intangible things I noticed while there, the subtle differences in the way one moves through a place. The balance between nature and society.
As a small example though: While I am always most drawn to exploring nature, I found myself struck by the built environment of Japan. It was the design of its architecture and infrastructure that most held my attention, and left a lasting impression. Strangely, the scale of the roads cutting through the mountains is one of my first strong memories of being there.
Part of me wants to reject these structures that impose themselves on nature, but coming from the UK, where public infrastructure is often underfunded and inefficient, Japan felt really impressive.
I want to preserve nature, but I'm also a socialist who lives within a capitalist society, so public spending on efficient and effective public infrastructure is important, and I'd prefer it to be like Japan's than say HS2 in the UK. There is a lot more nuance to this subject, but these were thoughts I had on travelling through the country.
This wasn’t a theme I explored much in this book, I was drawn more to traditional Japanese buildings in my photographs, but I did include a little of the stark beauty and atmosphere of the Tadao Ando buildings and projects we visited, as a nod to more modern Japanese architecture.
What were your intentions when photographing the road trip, and did you envision the images to come together as a photobook?
I actually didn’t go with any intentions. Japan is somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit, and I’ve been so influenced by its culture and many of its photographers that I was wary about going with preconceived ideas. I just wanted to be there, and take in what came to me.
With the awareness that I was just a tourist, I knew I needed any work I made to be more about the personal than the representational. I’m trying to recreate my experience, what I felt, rather than a book about Japan. My insecurities did ask if work shot in Japan, by a western photographer, who is deeply influenced by Eastern culture, is just destined to be a pastiche, or at worst, a cliché?
I didn't really look at the photographs I took for over a year and a half. Then a few months ago, after a tough year, I wanted to dip back into better times, so I started to piece together the photographs into combinations that rekindled that energy and those emotions. Ironically, I can now see the influence of all the photographers I admire in these works, I guess there's no escaping what has shaped us. Looking at it more positively now, I feel comfortable with how their influence inherently bleeds into what I’ve made. I see it as a testament to their great contributions to the creative conversation.
(As a nice side benefit of this, a friend recently introduced me to the work of Kishin Shinoyama, as one of my works reminded them of one of his.)
I focused on creating a series of combinations that are playful, and represent the connections I felt between nature, my relationship with my partner, my love, the architecture, the spirituality and the atmosphere we encountered. As with my previous book, Rock Pile of the Summer Dwelling, it's a portrait of my relationship, and the relationships I see around me. It's my partner, my time in a place, and I guess me, all connected.
How did the graphic design choices, such as the choice of paper and printing, as well as the gatefold opening and Kangxi binding, shape or respond to your photographs?
I see making a book not only as a vessel for my photographs. It has to reflect them, and comfortably show them, but it is also its own piece of artwork. The journey I go on while making it, and its final form are just as important to me as the photographs within it.
The gatefold opening was probably where the project began. I took part in one of Matt Martin's excellent binding workshops at Toner Gallery in Penzance. He showed us a couple of stab binding variations, one of which included gatefold pages, and this opened up possibilities for how to present my work from the trip.
I've always loved the way 和本 Wahon, (traditional Japanese books) open and read in the opposite direction to western books. I get a small joy from this surprising change to our western assumptions of form, but I didn't want to just make a pastiche of these books. The gatefold felt like a nice nod to them, a mix of West and East, to reflect the nature of what I was making. The book opens in a traditionally western orientation, but each page folds out and back in the reverse of this.
I wanted to use the book making process as a way to develop my skill in this beautiful Japanese craft, which I've admired for a long time, but stab binding makes it difficult to fully open a book. It can be awkward to include double page spreads of landscape orientated images. The gatefold allowed me the freedom to include them.
I try to make objects that embrace imperfection, and while I aspire to precision, I'm not really interested in a clean, clinical finish. I also have a desire to make books that feel valuable, but are priced in a way that is accessible. Small runs, but relatively affordable, which is a challenge.
The paper I use is a flecked recycled stock. It has a warmth that reflects the washi or tea stained silver gelatin paper I use to make my prints and will age with its owners, yellowing a little over the years.
I used Risograph printing, a Japanese invention, for my first book, and I couldn't imagine making this book another way. The soy ink is a pure black, something that other modern printing processes often struggle to achieve, and the texture of each print is grainy and rich. It smudges in places, and comes away on the fingers a little.
These choices remind the owners of the book that it was made in a small batch, with natural materials, by the artist.