Petrograph Gallery: October 2013

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Here's a press release for my new photography installation, based on 18th century carvings in an historic cemetery here in NoHo:

HISTORIC NORTHAMPTON

Museum & Education Center
46 Bridge St., Northampton, MA 01060

Historic Northampton, Northampton Center for the Arts, and A.P.E. Gallery present

Hiraeth in Northampton: An Exploration of Longing

by Pamela Petro

November 8 – December 8, 2013

Opening Reception on Arts Night Out,
Friday, November 8, 2013   5-8 pm

    Hiraeth (HERE-eyth) is a Welsh word with no equivalent in English. It refers to “the presence of absence”— a yearning for the unattainable or irretrievable that exists beyond place or time. In “Hiraeth in Northampton: An Exploration of Longing,” writer and artist Pamela Petro has created an installation that cleaves to the heart of hiraeth, lodging it amongst the masterfully carved 18th century gravestones in Northampton’s Bridge Street Cemetery.
    The interactive installation turns the presence of absence into a dialogue between centuries, the living and dead, words and images, and sentient beings and stones. Viewers will be asked to have their photographs taken through a series of salvaged windows, each of which is printed with the image of an 18th century gravestone carving. Viewers will also be asked to choose a line of text to hold in the photograph, taken from one of the cemetery’s epitaphs. The final collection of photos will result in an artist’s book that catalogues a conversation between previous and current residents of the city, and will serve as testimony that hiraeth is a creative conundrum: we long for the impossible—to meet the dead, to experience the past, to inhabit the same place in another time—and while we cannot overcome hiraeth literally, we push ourselves to fill its gulf with imaginative collaborations.

Pamela Petro is a writer and artist who teaches creative non-fiction at Smith College and on Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. She is the author of three works of travel literature and has written for publications from The New York Times to Granta and The Paris Review. In 2011 she was selected as a Grand Canyon Artist in Residence for her visual work with “petrographs,” environmental installations of photographs printed on stone. In 2007, as a Black Rock Arts Fellow, she printed silver gelatin photographs on the sidewalks of Northampton in her installation, “Fleeting Fossils.” For more images please see www.petrographs.blogspot.com, and to read more on hiraeth, go to http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/09/18/dreaming-in-welsh/.

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.