Petrograph Gallery: November 2013

Monday, November 11, 2013

Images from Opening Night

of the installation

"Hiraeth in Northampton: An Exploration of Longing"

The installation will be up at Historic Northampton Museum (46 Bridge St., in Northampton, MA) until 6 December, 2013. The images printed on old windows--salvaged from local farmhouses--are from Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton. They're all examples of beautiful, inventive, forgotten 18th century stone carvings, from the death's heads carved early in the century to more portrait-like soul effigies carved toward the end.

My hope was to initiate a conversation between past residents of the city and current ones, by inviting visitors to choose a window and stand behind it, and also to choose a line of text as a caption. The texts come from epitaphs on the gravestones--such as "Earth's highest station ends in 'here he lies'," pictured above--and also lines from poetry and discussions of "hiraeth," which is a Welsh word implying an unrequited longing: something along the lines of "The Presence of Absence," also pictured above.

Opening night was terrific: many people participated, and I thank you, one and all. If you're anywhere near Northampton, please go and have your picture taken!

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.