Petrograph Gallery

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage

Post 17

It's finally happened: I've caught up to myself in real time. The work and thoughts I'm posting are concurrent with the work and thoughts I'm doing.

Last year this time I was preparing to go to the Grand Canyon as the January/February Artist in Residence. It was daunting and exciting and thrilling and frightening. Who knew I'd come away with the earth's shadows, and print them on Atlantic Ocean beach pebbles. Not me...

I was at the Canyon from 25 January to 15 February, 2011. So to honor that one-year anniversary, I will post one or two finished pieces of artwork sometime in that period. First, I have to do the finishing part...When I put new work up, I'll make an announcement on Facebook. And then that will conclude this series, which began (oh, to have picked a different date!) 11 September, 2011.

For now, I leave you with an image of the studio in the beautiful artist's apartment above Verkamp's Visitors Center...

And also a word of thanks to Rene Westbrook and the South Rim Artists in Residence Program at the Canyon. I'd hoped I could live up to the long tradition of artists who've lived and worked at the Grand Canyon, and be "inspired" while I was there. But my work turned out not to be the issue at all. The important thing was just being there, to receive the baton from the artist before me and pass it to the one that followed, keeping the chain of human wonder strong and unbroken. What an honor to be part of it. Wonder is where both stewardship and art come from. It's the wonder that matters.

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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.