Carey Neal Gough
HORSEDREAMER
Mulberry and Lime - Lexington, KY
July 18 - August 30, 2025
For this incarnation of my Horsedreamer series, I’ve returned to the darkroom—specifically, to the slow, alchemical process of gum bichromate printing—to reimagine my ongoing photographic pursuit of horses. These images, rooted in dream, memory, and the mythic presence of horses in the landscape, resist the clarity and precision of the digital. Gum printing leaves more room for magic and the unexpected. It’s a process built on layers, time, and chance. No two prints are the same.
Gum bichromate printing is a 19th-century photographic process traditionally used by Pictorialist photographers to create painterly, expressive images. It involves coating paper with a light-sensitive mixture of gum arabic, dichromate, and pigment, then contact printing it with a negative and exposing it to UV light. After exposure, the print is developed in water, revealing an image that can be built up through multiple layers. The process is slow, physical, and highly personal—each print is unique.
Each print begins with a cyanotype base, over which layers of pigment are hand-applied and exposed to light. The full process can take several days. Its unpredictability feels true to the dreamspace I’m trying to depict—a place where the seen and the felt, the remembered and the imagined, blur into one another. Did I know that horse, or did I dream her? Was the sky pink that day—or was it purple?
By letting go of mechanical perfection, I’ve found a more faithful way to express the emotional and intuitive core of these photographs. The horses in my prints emerge as a fusion—part the vivid, fantastical ones of my childhood, conjured from films, Saturday morning cartoons, and the pocket-sized plastic ponies I played with; part the real animals that are abundant in the Kentucky landscape where I grew up. In these images, the imagined and the actual entwine—and in their union, something deeper is revealed.
This work is about longing, about slowness, and about the persistent echo of the natural world in our inner lives. It’s about honoring the magic that feels so accessible in childhood, even as nearly every aspect of adulthood seems intent on pressing it out.