Petrograph Gallery: March 2012

Sunday, March 25, 2012

In Memoriam

Stephen Petro, 1921-2012

Tenby Harrison-Petro, 1997-2012

My dad and our dog--both beloved, quirky, smart, generous souls--died on the same day, Thursday, 22 March, 2012.

I haven't created installations from either of these petrographs yet, but I will. In the meantime, I wanted to post these simple images in their honor. My dad is fishing from a jetty, in case you're wondering.

When Tenby was little and my parents cared for her when we traveled, she'd often wake around 5 am and start whining and barking, threatening to wake everyone at my family's Cape house. So my dad would get up, put her in the car, and drive her round and round the back roads of Cape Cod for hours, until everyone else woke up.

When I heard about it later I was horrified, but he told me how much he enjoyed it: just the two of us, he said, driving into dawn. So that's how I see them now. I'm glad they could go together.

Here's a link to my dad's obituary: http://www.myveronanj.com/2012/03/25/obituaries-stephen-petro/

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.