Petrograph Gallery

Sunday, June 3, 2012

NewOld Work

Hello Blogworld.

I'm still not finished with my Grand Canyon: AfterImage series, but I've recently been teaching myself PhotoShop with images from older installations, so I thought I'd post those. Ever since I began making petrographs and photo'ing them, in 2006, I've imagined presenting the finished work from the series in sequenes of images. Petrographs are all about flux and time and change, and the sequence, rather than one iconic image, captures that best.

So here are some finished compositions from installations I completed between 2006-2010: Mill River, Sandwich Beach, Storytellers Cairn, Fleeting Fossils, Tides: New Brunswick, the Menna Series, the Mary Series, Faces in Nature, and Ghosts of Overbrook. These are just a handful of finished compositions that I picked at random.

All of these images represent "artisiinal" (ha! I love that word--here it means, "crafted lovingly by hand in the darkroom") photographs that I scanned to digital files, except for the color Mary Series shots, which are digital originals.

The Grand Canyon images will follow...

Marys of the Northeast (2009)

Fleeting Fossils, Aisha's Image (2007)

Fleeting Fossils, Ghost Children (2007)

Tides, Marguerite in the Bay of Fundy (2008)

Sandwich Beach, Marguerite in the Storm (2006)

Marys in Pentre Ifan, Wales; Grand Canyon; Maine; Conques, France; Conques again; Grand Canyon again (2011)

Two Tenbys (2010)

Faces in Nature, Leaves (2009)

Storytellers, Ray Hicks Triptych (2007)

Fleeting Fossils, Spectrum (2007)

Marguerites, Mill River, Sandwich Beach, Bay of Fundy (2006-2008)

Ghosts of Overbrook, Windows (2010)

Fleeting Fossils Faces (2007)

Ghosts of Overbrook, Field Tree Triptych (2009-10)

Menna Elfyn (2010)

Ghosts of Overbrook, Three Trees (2008-09)

Faces in Nature, Triptych (2009)

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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.