Petrograph Gallery: August 2015

Friday, August 28, 2015

The Dusk Series, Oregon

These images were taken in an Old Growth Forest on the slopes of Oregon’s Coastal Range, near a town called--evocatively if unfortunately this summer--Burnt Woods. Marguerite and I were on a collaborative retreat sponsored by Oregon State’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word; we spent two weeks writing, taking pictures, eating marion berries, and drinking Pinot Gris at the Cabin at Shotpouch Creek, which hunkers into a clearing in the forest.

The dusk pictures illustrate the goal of the project’s founder, Franz Dolp, who wanted to bring writers and artists to the forest to help “reimagine the relationship of human beings to the natural world.” The images capture the movement, or adjustment, of mind and imagination when confronted with something beyond itself, bigger than itself. They’re not just representations of what was seen, but of the meeting between seen and imagined--the place where eye meets mind. Or where the human eye meets the nonhuman “other”--in this case, a bloody big forest, at dusk.

For the ancient Celts, dusk was the beginning of the day, a time of possibility and maybe danger. Dusk offered the 24-hour cycle its thinnest space: a moment when different worlds overlapped and became porous. The Celts understood these worlds to be literal--the known space of human interaction and the less known world of spirits, and the dead. I read dusk metaphorically. In the words of Ciara Healy, who curated an exhibition called “Thin Space” in Wales earlier this year, thin spaces like dusk might be moments when “we are capable of inhabiting more than one world-view at the same time.” And that was Franz’s goal in a nutshell. Enjoy the images. As usual, they're straight digital shots, unmanipulated in any way--I just moved the camera.

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.