Water as a Sciptor: Citrinitas

Citrinitas is a strictly in-camera series, made with condensation and snail trails on glass. Through disciplined return and waiting, traces become luminous scripts and imagined landscapes—water and life writing in yellow light.

Water as a Scriptor: Citrinitas

Five in-camera photographs made over time with condensation and snail trails on glass.

• A sustained, multi-year investigation into the threshold between the minuscule and the monumental

• How snail trails and condensation can be read as script, revealing imagined terrains and calligraphic signs

• A mode of seeing where perception shifts: surface becomes landscape

Citrinitas is created entirely in-camera through repeated visits and disciplined observation. The images are made on glass surfaces where former snail trails persist and become visible only when condensation catches the light. No montage, no compositing, no AI—only water, trace, light and time. The work is “earned” through waiting: returning, observing, and photographing when conditions align.

The series is anchored in the alchemical notion of Citrinitas: the stage of “yellowing”, associated with a turn towards solar light and transformation. A palette of luminous yellows and warm ambers is not an effect but a consistent field of attention—an attempt to elevate fragile residues into images of radiance without leaving the realm of the real.

Across the five works, biological residue and condensation transmute into delta systems, mountain ranges, and celestial calligraphy. The photographs do not document a surface as an end in itself; they open a threshold where the viewer’s imagination completes what the camera records. Citrinitas invites an internalised kind of looking—slow, precise, and receptive to scale-shifts.

In an age of instant images, Citrinitas insists on persistent vision: attention as labour, and wonder as method. The “scriptor” is not the artist’s hand, but water and life itself, quietly writing on glass—reminding us that the overlooked can hold vast worlds.