earth skin

The below images include composites made using red bole – a rust-red sedimentary rock that forms on top of ossified lava in the periods between eruptions. It is partly made up of scorched forests, ‘bole’ meaning ‘the body or trunk of a tree’. This particular bole dates back 60 million years and provides a record of the Isle ofMull’s subtropical history.

This rock was once a forest, spongy, fuzzy redwood that, in a great pyroclastic kiln, transformed into dense, brown-red stone. In these images, the bole undergoes another metamorphosis, this time from solid to liquid, embodying a shift from something seemingly unmoving, constant, and rigid, to something flowing, elusive, and mercurial, just as it did when it joined the ancient lava flows whose trajectories terraformed the island I stand on today.

In a culture that barely acknowledges the connections between humans and animals, this series goes a step further, speaking to the kinships between rock bodies and human bodies, and also to the questions: what does it mean to make an inside an outside?; what does it mean to be a body that is erratic and enduring the same breath?

The series includes a prose-ish poem drawing on these relationships (see below).

Paint red bole, gum arabic, olive oil

Gathered, processed, and photographed on the Isle of Gometra, summer 2024.