A psychologist explores an unseen past to better understand our present; a geologist studies the epochal forces that shaped the landscapes we know. My project “Animated Drawings for a Twilight” journeys between the invisible realms of feeling and physics across a series of landscapes to reckon emotionally with the earth’s transformations, both historically and projected.
In my work, I am driven by the twinned emotions of awe and fear about the earth’s changing climate. I seek psychologically attuned ways of engaging my viewers: rather than inducing terror at a world in flux, I aim for scenes of wonder to approach a topic often too frightening to consider head on.
I create fleeting illuminations with battery powered projectors, which allow me to unobtrusively collaborate with each landscape (in contrast with the earth-moving works of previous land artists). My work is time- as much as site-specific: I seek the moment of twilight when day’s dying light and projected artificial light harmonize, and I track the tides so I know what the water will reveal. Rooted in scientific research and visual exploration, the projected animations are created through accruing layers of hand-drawn stop-motion to echo each location’s geologic history and evoke how much change the will undergo yet. The photographic prints serve a distillation of each site’s many time-scales and the only enduring physical site of my “intervention” on the landscape.
