Borrowed Vessels
With clay harvested from Socorro, New Mexico, I crafted a pot with a lightproof lid and a single pinhole. Light refracting off the world outside channels itself through the hole, into the vessel and projects an image inside the pot. I made this pot so that the land could envision itself. The photographs mark a phase within the pot’s life in which it seems to exist as separate from the earth it is made from.
Yet, the pot is, was, and will be part of the earth from which it came; an experience shared by all things with physical form; consisting of different arrangements of matter. Everything is entangled in an unending process of becoming and unbecoming. For human life, this unbecoming is most often conceived of as looming mortality, a binary opposition between life and death and a kind of mortality that is distinct from non-animate beings. There are two primary paths to confront this fact of mortality and the suggestion that all matter is continuous, relational, and equal: one is nihilism, a belief that the world comes from nothing and returns to it. The other is a sense of presence and embodiment which brings an acceptance of impermanence and reveals the infinite fullness of our collective temporality.
The photographs made in this pot are the product of collaborating agents overlapping in a particular slice of time and space. They embody the enmeshed relationship of infinite entities converging: myself, the pot, light, the land, long-dead inventors of photo chemistry, those that will see the photos when I am no more; the list does not end. We are all entangled in everything that was and will be.
With clay harvested from Socorro, New Mexico, I crafted a pot with a lightproof lid and a single pinhole. Light refracting off the world outside channels itself through the hole, into the vessel and projects an image inside the pot. I made this pot so that the land could envision itself. The photographs mark a phase within the pot’s life in which it seems to exist as separate from the earth it is made from.
Yet, the pot is, was, and will be part of the earth from which it came; an experience shared by all things with physical form; consisting of different arrangements of matter. Everything is entangled in an unending process of becoming and unbecoming. For human life, this unbecoming is most often conceived of as looming mortality, a binary opposition between life and death and a kind of mortality that is distinct from non-animate beings. There are two primary paths to confront this fact of mortality and the suggestion that all matter is continuous, relational, and equal: one is nihilism, a belief that the world comes from nothing and returns to it. The other is a sense of presence and embodiment which brings an acceptance of impermanence and reveals the infinite fullness of our collective temporality.
The photographs made in this pot are the product of collaborating agents overlapping in a particular slice of time and space. They embody the enmeshed relationship of infinite entities converging: myself, the pot, light, the land, long-dead inventors of photo chemistry, those that will see the photos when I am no more; the list does not end. We are all entangled in everything that was and will be.
