Anticline reflects upon the imperceptible processes of change that
shape the landscape in deep time. The series weaves a dialogue between
images of various phenomena; folded sedimentary rock, a submerged Bronze
Age forest, fossilised trees from the Jurassic, sea eroded natural arches,
and extant temperate rainforest. Relics of ecosystems originating in the
remote past that persist in the landscape, petrified in different stages of
disappearance. My intention is to consider the landscape as an evolving
archive, an entity in a continual state of flux and metamorphosis,
recording its successive iterations over time in its own fabric.
These phenomena are approached as the product of a collision between
overlapping timescales, cyclical processes and geological forces, where
rock warps and wood resists the weight of eons, eroding the ostensibly
fixed boundary between the organic and the geologic. The images populate a
primordial conception of time, a complex and immense temporal web in which
we are all enmeshed and in which our crises and endeavours as a species
must be contextualised. Taking this view, we might see a suggestion of our
precarious future in fossilized floods and prehistoric extinctions,
entertaining the possibility that both deep pasts and futures might also be
inhabited by the photographic instant.