Petrograph Gallery

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

GRAND CANYON;

AfterImage Series

Post 15

In real time, I'm writing this poised between Christmas 2011 and New Year's 2012: HAPPY HOLIDAYS, bloggers.

In blog time, it's still summer, and I'm in Harrington, Maine, working on installations of palm-size petrograph beach pebbles, printed with images of immense shadows thrown by rock formations onto the walls of the Grand Canyon.

In my previous post I showed images of the pebbles against a sea grass backdrop. Those photos were taken on the property of our rental house, which sat at the confluence of a tidal inlet and a bay. This group, shot on a sandy beach and at the tideline itself, was taken at the Petit Manan Wildlife Reserve in Millbridge, Maine. Getting to the refuge involved a 20 min. ride from our house to the parking lot, in the midst of blueberry barrens, and then a half-hour walk across granite outcrops and through a scrub forest to the beach.

Lichen on the hike to the beach; and below, images of the beach that awaited

To see a set of semi-abstract photos of the beach, look to the lefthand column under "Normal Photos," and click on the image under "Normal But Abstract."

When I first envisioned this series, back in the artist in residence's living room at the Grand Canyon, I imagined taking the pebble shots at the beach, in sand and underwater. It made the most sense to me; I liked the idea of markers of hours--the Canyon shadows--brought to the beach where they would summon aeons--a memory of what the Canyon once was.

Here are some of the shots:

The above AfterImage shots were taken, respectively, in wet sand at the sea's edge and dry sand at the beach's perimeter; same with the ones below. In between the top shots is an AfterImage progression from the dry perimeter into the waves themselves.

And these are some of a the water shots...

I'm not particularly happy with the compilation below, but it gives a sense of progression, at least. I'll work on it...(These are all just working shots; I've really no idea yet what the finished work will look like...)

The pebble shot below was taken at Jasper Beach, an all-pebble beach near Machias, Maine. An snapshot of the beach follows...

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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.