All things laid dormant

How can we relate to our non-human others in times of extinctions knowing, as we must, that we live among the ruination of others? Whilst living beings are bound in ecological communities of life and death, in which life constantly makes and and unmakes itself in cycles of renewal, the man-made mass destruction at play in the environmental catastrophe not only attacks the generative qualities of death, but fundamentally carries the implication that the death of animals, peoples and environments is morally irrelevant, 'collateral damage'. All things laid dormant attempts to create a space for longing, love and grief by relying on the ambiguities of the photographic medium - which both brings us into encounter and constitutes a barrier between the body and the world - to create a space in which to re-experience the dramas of encounter in a more-than-human world. And yet these encounters also embody a series of little failures: a way of being always on the verge of a contact that never quite becomes fulfilled. Moving constantly between presence and absence, life and death, proximity and distance, contact and loss of contact, love and grief, All things laid dormant would like to enter a sort of call-and-response with the world, in a world in which living beings are constantly calling and being called, coming into encounter, and bringing the self and the other into mutuality. All things laid dormant consists of photographs, texts and sculptural pieces. The sculptures, made in ceramics, are glazed with a blend in which I recycled silver extracted from exhausted darkroom fixer. The texts morph into different forms and materials from show to show: I have printed them in the darkroom and developed them in plant based developer, I have printed them on leaves through chlorophyll printing processes, and I have hand-written them on the wall with vegetal charcoal.