Petrograph Gallery

Monday, October 10, 2011

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Entry 5

Mary Diaz was one of my favorite people on the planet. I knew almost nothing when I arrived as a freshman at Brown, but Mary was on my hall and I knew I wanted to be her friend. If she was excited about something she'd grab your arm and shake it up and down. Sometimes she thought chocolate and Grape Nuts were more important than going to class. Being on time ranked lower than advocating for the world's refugee women and children. Tennis was good but ice cream was better. She had a strong faith, but she asked hard questions.

Mary and I were chambermaids together for a summer on Block Island. Once we ate an entire half-gallon of ice cream and a jar of fudge sauce for lunch. Every night we dug a hole in the sand, lined it with rocks, and cooked our dinner. We broke into a summer cottage just to go to the bathroom and cried over Tess of the D'Urbervilles. After you do that, you're pretty much sisters, even though your DNA says otherwise.

Mary died of pancreatic cancer in 2004. There's a great tennis tournament every summer in Columbus, Ohio in her memory, and that of William Copeland, which raises funds for PanCan research (http://www.diaztennis.bbnow.org/). My artwork doesn't raise money but it helps me keep Mary's memory fresh and pertinent and beside me, whenever I travel. (This, for the woman who once got a passport on the way to the plane....) A few years ago I printed some rocks with Mary's image and decided to take one with me wherever I go, so that as art, she will continue to do and become and evolve along with me.

The image that opens this post is the newest in the Mary Series, from my favorite particular place on earth, Pentre Ifan cromlech, near Newport in Northern Pembrokeshire, Wales. The ones that follow were taken at the Canyon. These images aren't part of my AfterImage Series, but they exist beside, and enrich, it.

I took some of these pictures lying on my belly on an escarpment that jutted precariously out into the Canyon. I carefully inched out there, and carefully inched back. This is what I wrote in my journal when I came inside:

Monday, 7 February 2011, “Mary & Pam”

They had sand in common that summer. Sand on the floors they swept, sand in the sheets they changed. Sand in the shack where they stayed. Sand at the bottom of the toilets they cleaned that flushed away but always returned with the backwash. Sand in their sneakers, sand on the chocolate donuts they dropped on the beach and ate anyway. Sand under their fingernails after they dug fire holes at the beach to cook their dinner.

Twenty years later one is sand in the other’s memory. Not quite a pearl. Not yet. But the grit is there and memory is working on it.

Pam is lying on her belly on a precipice at the Grand Canyon. Not too close to the edge because her father warned her, and deep down, when it comes to things like this, she heeds her father’s advice. (She will never bicycle, ever, without wearing shoes). In front of her is a pebble imprinted with Mary’s photo. It’s lodged in a canning jar in a bed of sand and smaller pebbles. The jar is filled with water—a marker of the long-ago summer and the far-off Atlantic.

Pam photographs the memory held in stone as early morning sun wakes the jar. Stone is all around her. Trillions of individuals sleep in this motherlode of stone. And yet only this one in the canning jar has a face.

She scrambles carefully to her feet—she’s heard about mules going over the edge, and the condors who come to feast—and discovers she’s covered with dust. The remains of creatures that once sought food and safety and were genetically programmed to reproduce now cling to her black ski jacket. She’s brushing it off when she looks up. A mule deer is staring right at her. Very close. There’s another nearby, in the shadows behind her, picking her way carefully around the rocks.

Click on "The Mary Series" on the lefthand side of my blog to see more images from other locations. One of the mason jar images will be included in the National Park Service Exhibition, "Through Your Eyes," in 2012.

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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.