<p>Emma Powell can't sleep. And her insomnia has led her to create a Neil Gaiman-esque fantasy through her self-portraits. To create her unique blend of nightmare and fantasy, she uses a variety of poetically appropriate ingredients: cyanide, iron, tea and wine.</p><p>Cyanotype printing, invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842, involves placing a negative directly on paper coated with a UV-sensitive combination of cyanide and iron. As the image takes form, Powell rinses the print in water to stop the process. All this enables Powell, a lecturer in photography and Artist in Residence at Iowa State University, to create the deep, dream-like blues which she then warms with tannic acids.</p><p>Powell views her portraits as a "visual lullaby" that allows her to engage with her insomnia. She's always avoided sleep, even as a child growing up in Vermont. The 28-year-old says her father, also a photographer, would work every night in his darkroom until three in the morning, only to come home to his daughter awake and waiting.</p><p>They'd wander into the fields in the darkness to look at the constellations. Then her father would tell her fantastical stories that started at home and then took her "down open drains to a dream-world of caverns, forests and oceans" fraught with danger and packed with adventure. He told her these stories every night to calm his daughter to sleep.</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/10/emma-powell-in-search-of-sleep/">Keep reading...</a></p>