Petrograph Gallery: June 2014

Friday, June 13, 2014

Vessels: Land and Sea

This beautiful vessel is from Marged Pendrell's "Traces of Walks" series, which is a subset of her installation entitled "Vessels: Land and Sea." The series gathers physical evidence--in this case sand--to evoke memories of walks taken by the artist and her friends on journeys in Wales and abroad. It's made of collected sand and paper pulp; as Marged writes, "An object or material is collected as a connection to a place. It marks the quality of time passed, the essence of the place and the memory of the experience."

I found Marged's work at the Gas Gallery in Aberystwyth, Wales, and purchased the above vessel. I was struck by the strength of the her work and its beautiful, concise way of evoking place, physical activity, and memory through the physical shape of the vessel and the use of paper pulp; like books, it represents our hope of holding and containing the past. I love the fact that this vessel is filled with the stuff of itself. We are our memories.

To see more of Marged's work please visit www.axisweb.org/artist/margedpendrell

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.