six years ago, i travelled to the desert southwest to immerse in a new landscape and open to new possibilities. the cliched 'vastness of the desert' held promise for rebooting, realigning, reconfiguring. i did not anticipate that entering into that geography would alter my temporality, my perception, my body’s relationship to thought—that it would initiate a metamorphosis of my being.
that trip was to Grand Staircase-Escalante, introducing me to a small region of the 130,000 square miles of the geologically named Colorado Plateau. what occurred there fundamentally altered me and my approach to my work (see lithic dust . series 1).
since that trip, i have made annual pilgrimages to different regions of the Plateau. my most recent sojourn found me in the near geographic center of the Plateau, the De-Na-Zin Wilderness (the anglicization of the Diné name for the area, Dééł Naazj). the area lies roughly 100 miles southeast of where the imagined borders of what are presently known as Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah converge. i’ll admit to veering toward superlatives each time i enter a new area of the Plateau. from the first, each landscape overflows sensorially, energetically, spiritually and each has informed, if not transformed, my work. yet, De-Na-Zin exists on an entirely different level.
there is much to lament about the propensity for our culture to set us—humans—apart from the rest of the earth and her creatures. to really know a place is to forget what you think you know about it, to unlearn logics, taxonomies, acculturated expectations and proclivities and simply enter the land and participate with it with humility.
yet, there is something in the geologic knowing of the land that deepens my connection to it, that opens my senses to a collaborative arrangement with the land. what i am reaching for here is not imposing sensemaking, but participating in a shared act of expression. to interpret the geology through the self, allowing the self to become a geological instrument— an ear, a hand, a resonance chamber through which the earth and the self might, for a moment, be in total consonance— a circular, spatial, seeing-feeling-knowing simultaneity.
these field notes are provisional. what emerges here is from initial deep looking and remembering that allows me to open the strata of the geography so i can return to it later and work with what surfaces. they are—literally—the first exposures for a path toward work; the initiating layer of forms to come.
the striations are the diary of geologic eras and periods—of seaways, rivers, swamps, and ashfalls written in sediment. each stripe represents environmental shifts—wet to dry, stagnant to flowing, deposition to erosion. not just color bands, but successive worlds: swamp, flood, fire, burial, desiccation.
draw in close and the body shifts from visual resonance to wanting to know tactilely and emotionally. the mudstones and siltstones, being so fine-grained, record forces the way skin records touch, and i want to respond in kind. each texture has its own tempo—it’s own emotional resonance. some of the surfaces hum, others hiss, vibrate, flutter.
what is underneath/behind those marks? experiencing them in this present, suggests a wanting to know what came before they were in the form they are now. as i leap at wanting to interpret, i am interrupted by whispers of Karen Barad’s ideas of intra-action tempered by relational ontologies (see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tyson Yunkaporta, et al) reminding me that knowing is a reciprocal process grounded in relationship and respect. to interpret the land, the stone, the forms before me, is not to extract their meaning but to enter a relationship where understanding is gifted through reciprocity and humility. where interpretation, at its most radical, isn’t appropriation or translation at all, but co-creation of meaning within a shared field.
tiny scallops from flowing water. microscopic chatter-marks from wind-driven grit. salt efflorescence blooming like frost from chemical crusting. desiccation cracks, curling like calligraphy. frost wedging scars, prying open soft layers like a geologic inhalation-exhalation. iron oxide dendrites, stretching across small chasms like fingers reaching for the familiar skin of another. the fine silt still holding salts and gypsum—whispering of the sea that birthed it.
it all strikes me as some hybrid of touch-response, braille, or hieroglyphs etched by universal forces. the surfaces read like something is trying to communicate, only the syntax operates on a temporal register our bodies aren’t calibrated for, so i grasp at metaphors: veins, braille, hieroglyphs, petrified rainfall, whisper-script.
meaning without symbol; communication without subject.
diagenesis:
the slow transformation of loose sediment into stone.
time pressing perception into matter, matter reawakening the memory of its own making.
i lay down in the wash to absorb the coolness of the silts still wet and shaped by overnight rains. it is no longer questions of “what are these forms?”; “what are they destined to become?” De-Na-Zin has written, in its own syntax, the questions the deserts have always been asking—questions I am only now learning to listen with, to live alongside, to let re-form me. i am at a threshold of entering into geologic syntax, allowing it to alter my temporality, my perception, my body’s relationship to thought. opening to permeability between self and source and to a willingness to let the geologic lexicon rearrange my cognitive structure—my rhythm of making, my sense of time, my concept of authorship.
the questions now are how to sense the land asking to speak through me, rather than to me. how to participate in dialogues with forces—diagenesis, erosion, oxidation, sedimentation, wind’s abrasion—that predate me and will long outlast me. how to coexist with the land as a total gesture: circular, spatial, simultaneous. how to surrender—not to interpreting what the marks mean, but to inhabiting how they mean.
interpretation as embodiment rather than as translation.
