Material: Charcoal pigment inks,Awagami Kozo Thin White 70 g. Paper,Frame flush 12/45 mm koto wood tinted waxed ink of black China
A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones presents photographic works resulting from Amélie Labourdette research at the New York State Museum in Albany, NY. Detailed exploration within the Paleobotany Collection enabled her to photograph fossil remains of the oldest forests on Earth found in Gilboa and Cairo dating from the Middle Devonian (385 million years ago). Alongside this exploration of the museum’s reserves, her research has been enriched by photographic work carried out in the heart of several contemporary forests in France and the United States.
This series revolves around the echoing of two bodies of images, each the photographic materialization of a more-than-human temporality – one testifying to the ancestral memory of the original forest, the other revealing the vibrant spectrum of contemporary forests – each reverberating in the other. It seeks to recognize a spirit at work in every stratum of nature – in this case plant and mineral – that relativizes any ontological superiority of mankind. And it is in line with current research into Earth Jurisprudence, which seeks to extend the political to the level of the Cosmos-Political, to take non-humans into account as Subjects of Rights within the political and legal spheres in an “enlarged parliament“.
The first corpus reveals the imprint of the plant memory of the oldest forest on Earth dating from the Middle Devonian, transmuted from plant to mineral within fossil fragments found in the Catskills. According to the Devonian Plant Hypothesis developed in Paleobotany, the process of afforestation of the Earth by these early forest ecosystems had far-reaching consequences for the dynamics of the Earth system, including the transformation of soil geomorphology, the evolution of the atmosphere and climate, and the associated expansion of terrestrial biodiversity. Like ghosts from the past, the mineralized, charcoal spectres of primordial forests emerge from the depths of the past and return to haunt us today, reminding us that the world we humans live in could not have existed without them.
The second corpus is the embodiment of a fossil vibration, the survival of an “ancestral spirit“ that manifests itself at the heart of present-day forests. Materializing the vibration of this original plant memory is consubstantial with the experience of this “flesh of the world“, lived in the heart of different forests: an experience linking body and mind, sensitivity to the vibratory frequencies of places and visions - the inner eye - open to the tangible and the intangible.
The Piezography printing process on Japanese paper, with inks composed of coal-black pigments, gives the photographic material a presence that is both dense and radiant. These prints evoke the experiments of the pioneers of photography, some of whom attempted to record “spectral apparitions“. In the iridescent shimmer and dense charcoal inks of these prints, the vibration of an archaic vegetal memory emerges. Isn’t charcoal the result of the partial decomposition of organic matter in primordial forests, an alchemical transformation that takes millions of years to go from vegetable to mineral? The very materiality of these prints, made from the transmuted dead bodies of these primeval forests, retains their memory spectrum.
A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of the stones is seen as the vibrating, memorial body of the forest - in subtle, interwoven layers.
##1 A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones
Contemporary forests / The spirit of the forest
Mossy forest, communal forest of Noidant-le-Rocheux, Haute-Marne,
France.
97 x 144.5 cm (print with frame) / Unique edition
PIEZOGRAPHY print (charcoal pigment inks) on Awagami Kozo
Thin White 70 g. Paper
*Special technique with two prints on paper.
Laminated on 2 mm Dibond.
Frame flush 12/45 mm koto wood tinted waxed ink of black China.
Courtesy of the artist Amélie Labourdette
