Petrograph Gallery

Sunday, November 27, 2011

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 11

One day in late spring, about 20 minutes before I was due to arrive at a friend's, I was walking our dog Tenby on the bikepath in Northampton. Ruts along either edge of the path were filled with fuzzy milkweed seeds, blown there on the wind. If whiteness could precipitate out of fog and crystalize, like salt from seawater, it would look like milkweed: fuzzy, pale, opaque, and soft.

I raced back to the house with the dog, left her home, grabbed my camera and the pebbles I'd already printed, and ran back to the bikepath. I wanted to see what they'd look like against the milkweed. I had no time for canyon clocks or world sundials or any kind of grand thoughts. I just lined up the pebbles and shot. It was the first time I'd done any kind of "installation"--a grand word in this case--with the Canyon shadow beach pebbles. Luckily, only one guy stopped me and wanted to know what I was doing. I just said I had some really cool pebbles and wanted to see what they looked like in milkweed, and he wandered away...

Here's what I got:

And then I started playing with the images...

Still a lot of work to do...

1 comment:

onlythejodi said...: Love love love these, particularly the vertical shot. What a terrific impulse, shooting on the milkweed.; November 28, 2011 at 6:06 AM

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.