Earthsea (2025)
“Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.”
This series was triggered by an accident. I corrupted a 120mm film while manually rewinding it in complete darkness onto the out-of-production reel of my “new”, hundred years old, Kodak Vollenda. In the middle of Scottish Highlands with no other camera or a spare film, I pushed away the thought of what, if anything, would come out of it and kept shooting. I didn’t expect much developing the film, but still my stomach dropped, as I pulled it out of the water. White stripes run in some unexplainable pattern across it, cutting through the rugged landscape and wiping off everything on their way. The negatives looked surreal and irredeemable... I didn’t have the heart to throw away the film and came back to it many months later, after I had time to reflect on the results of my “unmaking.”
The series was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea- a chronicle of “undoing” the “unmaking” and restoring the Equilibrium. Each image is named after an isle in the Earthsea archipelago and is a composite of the same negative developed at different exposures. I handprinted the images using solar etching.
Edition of 15 photopolymer gravures on Hahnemuhle paper. Paper size approx. 36x29cm (14.2x11.4 inches), image- 21x14.5cm (8.3x5.7 inches).