With Index, I draw upon my past experiences as a field biologist to process grieving around the impending loss we are facing as the result of climate change. These photograms serve as a record for what once was of the flora of a small patch of intertidal marsh of the St. George River. Reminiscent of herbarium records, the flora are memorialized and serve as a baseline against the impending change of increasing temperatures and rising waters. My small area of intertidal marsh will not be spared and will bear impact of these changes.
Regarding memento mori, Geoffrey Batchen noted,“…Such objects seek to remember a loved one, not as someone now dead, but as someone who was once alive, young and vital, with a future before them. In this kind of object, they will always have that future, a comforting thought, perhaps, for those who have been left behind.”
It is my hope that art such as this can serve as a conduit for a collective experience to develop a stronger sense of love and commitment to the places, the systems, the flora & fauna that inspire, nurture, and sustain us.
The images in this series (Index) are photograms. A photogram is made when an object, or objects, are placed on the surface of light-sensitive materials, such as a piece of paper, or a piece of glass. Photograms can be made with many photographic processes, such as silver gelatin paper, cyanotypes, and as I have done with this series, with gum-bichromate.
In this series, I have coated large sheets of fine printmaking paper with a slurry of watercolor pigment and gum arabic mixed together with a light sensitizer. I repeated this step until the desired color and density is achieved for each sheet. Once, dried, the individual plants I collected were placed on top of the sensitized paper within a very large contact printing which would be set in the sun to expose the sensitized paper with the shape and details of the plants.
