STATEMENT OF WORK

In my photographs, I want to represent the earth as a fundamentally disordered place, one whose fundamental laws are randomness and contingency, a place which produces and is subject to uncontrollable forces. I’m interested in the processes by which the world has come into being, as well as the ways that it is continuously making itself anew.

Throughout history, we have tried to overcome nature. We have used it for our own purposes, subjected it to our desires, extracted and utilized its products… and yet, ironically, we have found ourselves subjected to the forces of the very nature we have attempted to conquer. As soon as we have gained a certain degree of control over nature, as soon as we have begun to take from it to excess, something else we can’t control rears its head. 

The earth unleashes uncontrollable forces onto the bodies of its inhabitants. How do we respond to the imminent threat of our annihilation, how do we relate to the phenomena of life and death? Particularly, how do we relate to living and dying as these threats become increasingly real, their consequences increasingly perceptable? This is a concrete example of how we come face to face with the power of the earth – not only the limitations of our control over it, but the ways that it responds to our attempts at mastery over it.

What does it feel like to live on and alongside this unpredictable earth? What does it feel like to navigate the space between chaos and order? How does it feel to attempt to try, in vain, to control the outcomes of the natural world? How do we deal with that disorientation? How might we try to address the bodily experience of being in the world, the intense sensations and emotions, as well as the continuities and discontinuities of experience?