piles #6

After many days spent isolated during the Covid-19 quarantine, with very little input from the outside world, my mind seemed to stop working creatively and I was unable to make new images. I eventually visited a forest seeking inspiration.

I happened to be the only in the forest during that visit, and I experienced a sensation of the whole space circling around me so strongly that I became dizzy. In the embrace of deep nature, I entered an unusual state of mind in which I felt both peace and fear at the same time.

My first, overwhelming impression was that the forest was one immense and singular being. But I also began to sense a sort of gap, an unevenness in that space, which grew as I spent more time there.

Eventually, I have come to believe that the unevenness I sensed was an effect of the everlasting accumulation, or piles of time, that are embedded in the process of a forest growing.

I decided on wet plate collodion — with an old petzval lens — as the medium best suited to capture the essence of such a space which is then, through the image transfer to gelatin silver prints, deconstructed into fragments. The physical sensation of the forest’s “unevenness” is further emphasized by toning the randomly patterned image fragments with branches, leaves and soil from the shooting location. Finally, in order to diminish my own intervention as much as possible, I scatter the image fragments, shuffle and flip them, and tone randomly in different durations and baths. Then, the landscape is recomposed again.

By taking the photographic images through their own piles of time, matter, and process, I aim to embody the works with the sublime nature of the forest. And when these works are in turn seen and experienced by an audience, they perpetuate the piles of the original forest from which they were created.