Itself

A friend who was working in a photocopy shop agreed to smuggle out a new, unopened toner cartridge. I opened the protective Tyvek sealing label and carefully emptied the entire contents of the cartridge, through a cardboard masking sheet, onto a sheet of standard format paper. I removed the masking sheet leaving a precarious pile of black toner in its place. I photographed a gradual process of removal of the toner from the page until just a small amount of the fine black powder remained that was embedded in the fibres of the paper. I refilled the original cartridge with the removed toner and sealed it with a replica of the Tyvek label. The resealed cartridge was then smuggled back into the photocopy shop and the photographic sequence showing the removal process was printed from digital files, using the toner in the cartridge to reproduce a series of xerographic images of itself at actual size.