Petrograph Gallery: March 2011

Saturday, March 26, 2011

This was a 56" x 44" montage from my Faces in Nature Installation, that was originally shown at "Faces" in downtown Northampton. Shortly before I went out to the Grand Canyon as the January Artist in Residence there, the South Rim AIR program generously offered me a solo exhibition to coincide with my residency. So I shipped this hot-from-the-framer's montage via UPS, along with some other work. The montage arrived in 2 pieces; the edges looked as if they'd been chewed by dinosaurs. I managed to salvage nine contiguous images (from the upper lefthand corner), and it's currently being reframed.

This little triptych from the "Tides" installation on the Bay of Fundy was a much-delayed birthday present for my friend Caroline, a sculptor who lives in Shropshire, England. These incandescent, mushroom-like garden forms were her gift to me:

This montage is called "Marys of the Northeast," from the Mary Memorial series. From the top, left to right, the petrographs were shot in different rivers in Chester, Vermont (August 2009); Northampton, Mass (July 2009); Williamsburg, Mass (November 2009); Doorloo, New York (May 2010); Williamsburg, Mass (November 2009); and Northampton, Mass (July 2009).

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.