Petrograph Gallery: June 2011

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Four Craigs and Four Maries at Hughlet Point,

Northern Neck, Virginia

Two years ago I found a piece of driftwood along the beachfront at Hughlet Point on the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia. The coast has invaded the forest here; stumps of trees, smoothed and weathered gull-grey, stand knee-deep in the sea, as if forming a strange, permeable, erratic fence. Some trees lie flat, but most stand; the driftwood was a knotted arm broken off one of them.

I brought it home and printed it with a photograph of my brother Craig and his wife Marie, who live just a few miles up the shoreline, at the mouth of the Wicomico River. They're new to the area: casting their image into the sea on local bark was an act of introduction.

I took these pictures as the driftwood bobbed and flipped and spun and stuck in the warm wavelets along the shore. It wouldn't hold still, and my back ached from chasing it in a hermit-crab position. But I got some good images at different depths, under and out of the water. The sky and colors kept changing, with the result that some images read blue, others green, others ochre-brown, so I followed the color-thought of the moment and encouraged the hues to continue down the paths they'd already begun in the sun--or lack thereof...

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.