Petrograph Gallery: September 2012

Monday, September 24, 2012

AfterShadows, A Grand Canyon Narrative

Pamela Petro

2011-12

This image and word series stems from my artist's residency at the Grand Canyon in Jan-Feb, 2011. The four large text panels recount the evolution and inspiration of the narrative sequence. It will be available in book form as well as a limited edition print portfolio.

AfterShadows, A Grand Canyon Narrative, 2011-12

I saw absence at the Grand Canyon before I saw presence: Black, blank rivers of shadow cast by the Canyon’s garden of rock formations. More than the spectacular strata, deep time, for me, lay in the shadows—shadows that possessed powers of instant erosion, creating negative space, streaming like tributaries of the night sky down to the Colorado River.

I came to read the shadows as a great sundial—time displayed vertically, pivoting horizontally throughout the day—and told time by their presence. I took their pictures and recorded the hours at which the most iconic shadows were cast.

After returning to the East Coast I printed these immense rivers of blackness on small white beach pebbles collected along the Bay of Fundy, which possesses—in our eon, at least—the strongest, most erosive tides on earth. (The images on the pebbles are actual photographs, printed in the darkroom after I coated the rocks in liquid photo emulsion.)

I then arranged the pebbles in sequences: A “Canyon Clock” that told time throughout a winter’s day at the Grand Canyon; a “World Clock,” in which the pebbles represented different locations on the globe at the same moment.

The next step was to photograph the printed pebbles (“petrographs”) against background elements representing different phases of the Canyon’s development—ash, seawater, vegetation, mud , sand, and beach rocks—and at different times of day.

We all carry shadows, according to Carl Jung: Earlier, interior parts of ourselves we don’t express. What, I wondered, would the earth hide in its shadows? The images in my Grand Canyon Series visualize a rapproachment between questions like that—the stuff of human wonder—and the physical reality of our environment, in which our lives are cupped. Ashes to ashes. Pebbles to sand to sea to ash to rock to us—and back again.

Medium/Processes: Traditional photography; Liquid Light on Beach Pebbles; Digital Photography.

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.