The earth has always kept its own time, long before modern man made measuring techniques. Images of the striking Icelandic landscape were made on a trip there researching tephrochronology—the ability to map geological events using tephra, or volcanic ash. As the land was shaped by everything from massive volcanic eruptions and floods, to smaller phenomena like decaying insects and wildlife migration, a timeline stretching back billions of years emerged in the layers of earth beneath us.
In TEPHRA/Garden of Fireflies, images are created of and with the land and its wildlife, imagining them as organic traces of a geologic record unaltered by humanity and questioning our increasingly removed relationship to the earth. In these delicate images, exhibited as a nontraditional timeline, viewers are confronted with our own relatively new existence within the context of deep time.
