Petrograph Gallery

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Faces in Nature

An exhibition in the display window at "Faces" (185 Main St.) in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts, to be held from 11-31 May 2009.

5 comments:

hannah said...: Hi, I really like your images/process! It is extremely fascinating. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?; October 27, 2008 at 11:40 AM
patty said...: Pam!
I love your work-
I came across your name while looking into an art grant.
Patty Mc. (Picture This)
hi to M.; November 20, 2008 at 4:15 PM
Huw said...: I have read your WSJ article on your recent unfortunate incident at Heathrow. These strict liability regulations are a farce. I feel ashamed that you should meander the world learning Welsh and then have the door closed at Heathrow. Fly to Rhoose airport outside Cardiff next time and answer all entry questions in Welsh. Best wishes, Huw; September 17, 2010 at 3:06 AM
Rafael Jiménez Q. said...: HI,
NICE TO MEET YOU TROUGH YOUR ART WORK...ITS VERY ...VERY ROCKIE!!.I DONT KNOW..I M FROM MEXICO...COULD SAY "CHINGON" (IN A PROPER MEXICAN SPEAKING!).
IM A PHOTOGRAPHER, VIDEOGRAPHER TOO...
SO IM STARTING IN A FEW MONTHS WITH MY NEW LAB, AND LIQUIDLIGHT IS MY TASK!..; January 16, 2011 at 8:04 PM
Rafael Jiménez Q. said...: HI,
NICE TO MEET YOU TROUGH YOUR ARTWORK!..YOU ROCK!!.."ESTA CHINGONA TU CHAMBA MORRA!"IM FROM MEXICO SO I HAVE TO SAY SO...(IF I SPLIT THE S...)
IM A PHOTOGRAPHER TOO, AND SOME VIDEO..IM LOOKING FORWARD AND START MY LAB SOON, VERY VERY SOON!...AND LIQUID LIGHT IS AN 9 YEAR OLD PROJECT IN THE OVEN..LONG STORY..BUT NOW IS A "MUST"...I WOULD LIKE TO SHRE SOME COMMENTS AND TIPS IF YOU DONT MIND..IF SO..LET ME KNOW......SALUTE..FROM MEXICO..YOU ROCK HA??!!!; January 16, 2011 at 8:07 PM

Artist's Statement

Petrographs are silver gelatin images printed on stone. My name—Petro—means rock in Greek. What a stroke of luck….

When natives of northeastern Siberia saw a view camera for the first time they called it, “a three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.”

Petrographs do the same thing. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows to the bedrock, they juxtapose the “snapshot” span of our mortal memories with the vastness of geological time. And that puts humans’ experience on earth back into perspective. We are not the planet’s masters. We’re just one of many species passing through deep time.

I grew up with rocks in the house—my father was a mineral collector—but I don’t make petrographs for keeps. After harvesting rocks from rivers, seabeds, and quarries, I coat them in photographic emulsion, print them with images from the human sphere, and return them to their original locations. Then time, water, sunlight, and weather do their erosive work as I record the process with my camera. The results, revealing the rocks as they’re distorted, obscured, and weathered by ever-shifting environmental factors, evoke in days the passage of years, and tether us to natural cycles of decomposition and replenishment. The installations, which scientists assure me have no ill-effects on their host eco-systems, are fleeting. Our images disappear, and the rocks return to their own silent business.

There is a Welsh word—hiraeth—that has no cognate in English. It suggests something akin to the “presence of absence,” and refers to a deep, and creative, longing for something unattainable that exists only in the imagination, possibly beyond place or time. In the case of Wales, a subject state since the 13th century, it derives from a longing for a national history that should have been but never was: a gap filled by myths, legends, and once-and-future yearnings.

Petrographs exist in the gap between human consciousness and the world around us. As our images erode in the sea or a river or under the snow, or the sun weathers and cracks them, their weathering enacts the presence of absence before our eyes: the hiraeth of the natural cycle. They insist that our lives are snapshot moments, and that we belong to the earth—that it is our home.

Petrographs’ insistence on our place in the natural order is a sometimes beautiful, occasionally unnerving reminder of how place shapes us—the rocks’ histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, ancient seas, fire, and ice, become miniature landscapes that give mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the environment.