Plimsoll Gallery, 37 Hunter Street, Hobart
Please join us for this in-person photography workshop with artist Peter Maarseveen. Suitable for adults at all levels of knowledge and experience, materials are provided. Registration required.
Saturday 14 March 2026
10am - 2pm
Sunroom Gallery
University of Tasmania
37 Hunter St, Hobart
Each participant will produce images for an exhibition in the Sunroom Gallery space and will be able to take home their prints after the exhibition has concluded.
Peter Maarseveen
Peter is a photographic artist specialising in alternative analogue techniques. He explores how nature can contribute to the image-making process through camera-less methods, pinhole photography, constructing his own cameras, and more recently, creating his own photographic chemistry from plants and household ingredients. He is in the process of developing an off-grid, eco-friendly darkroom on his property in the Derwent Valley. The facility will be entirely powered by solar panels, utilise water from the creek running through the property, and employ only plant-based, biodegradable chemicals.
Step away from the glow of the digital world and immerse yourself in the slow, hands-on magic of analogue photography.
In this unique workshop, participants will explore alternative photographic processes by learning how to create plant-based photographic developer using native plants. Guided through the full process from chemistry to image-making, you’ll experiment with tray-based darkroom processing and produce paper negatives using handmade developer.
This workshop offers an intimate introduction to experimental analogue techniques, combining photography, botanical knowledge, and material exploration. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of photographic development, the creative possibilities of plant-based chemistry, and their own handmade photographic outcomes.
No prior darkroom experience is necessary — just curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
Please note all artworks and photographs created during the workshop will be displayed in an upcoming exhibition at the Sunroom Gallery. The exhibition will be open to the public from Tuesday, March 17th, through Friday, March 27th. An opening and closing event will be held on Friday, March 27th, from 5:30 to 8:00pm. All are welcome to attend.
This workshop is presented as part of the Against the Instant exhibition at the Plimsoll Gallery, 14 March – 24 April 2026
An exhibition exploring the enduring value of process and materiality in contemporary analogue photographic practice.
We live in a world where light pours endlessly from our screens, where algorithms anticipate our desires before we can even name them, where images proliferate faster than we can absorb them. In this constant stream of digital immediacy, something essential risks being lost: the quiet weight of the hand, the patience of process, the intimacy of creation.
This exhibition seeks to open a space apart from that acceleration. It invites us to slow down, to step into an environment where images are not delivered instantly but emerge through touch, chemistry, and care. Here, the works of the Analogue Photographic Society guide us back into the darkroom, that site of alchemy and anticipation: the scent of emulsion rising in the air, the soft glow of red light, the gradual reveal of form and tone as a print stirs into being within a tray of developer. To stand in this space is to be reminded that the photograph, before it is an image, is a material object—shaped by process, time, and the hand of its maker.
Within each work lies more than just the final captured scene. The photograph holds the trace of decision and hesitation, of experiment and accident, of the maker’s presence embedded in every grain of silver and every fibre of paper. The softness of focus, the fragility of tone, the unexpected blemish or distortion—these are not flaws but marks of humanity. They are reminders that to make slowly is also to allow for imperfection, for chance, for discovery.
Crucially, this is not a retreat into nostalgia. Rather, it is an affirmation of what remains vital in analogue practice today. At a time when so much of our visual culture is immaterial, disposable, and endlessly reproducible, the artists gathered here insist on the importance of tactility, of slowness, of presence. Their work resists the logic of instantaneity that governs our lives, offering instead images that reward sustained attention, that call us to linger, to dwell.
The exhibition proposes analogue photography as both practice and philosophy: a way of working that privileges the embodied, the material, and the human. It reminds us that the act of making is not separate from the object made; that the photograph is not only what we see, but how it was brought into being. In slowing down, in holding onto process, these artists reveal the enduring significance of material connection in a culture saturated with the immaterial.
Within the stillness of the gallery, the analogue print resonates with quiet insistence. It does not compete with the noise of digital saturation, but instead asks us to pause, to look closely, to feel the presence of the maker through the work. In doing so, it reaffirms that to create with care, to embrace the slow unfolding of an image, is to remain profoundly—and defiantly—human.
Artist name(s): Freya Wells, Claud Tero, Cullen Butters, Jeremy Hemming, Eddie James, Lily Jenkins, Guy Swan, Josh Harvey, Kelly Hammond, Jun Soong, Dylan Madge-Brady, Cassie McMahon, Luca Cartledge, Jenna Hawley, Aisha Sherman-Noth, Zoe Davis, Tomas Higgins, Rodney Spark, Jenny Bird, Peter Maarseveen, Ursula Woods
GALLERY OPENING HOURS
14 March - 26 April, 11am – 4pm, Tuesday to Saturday
Closed Sundays, Mondays and public holidays
Image credits: Peter Maarseveen, Tarkine - Myrtle (Nothofagus Cunninghamii), 2025, contact print from 4x5 paper negative, developer used: Myrtle.
