Inkjet on Japanese paper
14ʹ x 6ʹ x 1ʹ
Installation format
Precipitous is a collection of handbound accordion books that expand to create a life-sized panoramic image of a rising sea. As books, the works gesture to the authority of the encyclopedic and the cataloguing of natural specimens. As an installation, they dismantle sublime images through cuts, folds, and halftone dots. The images are photographs separated into a halftone dot pattern that are digitally printed on rolls of Japanese paper.
With a specific interest in printmaking’s historic relationship to representation, in this work I gesture to humans’ active role in constructing and idealizing landscape. Nature can no longer be seen as something set apart from humans but is instead something we fundamentally alter and continue to shape.
The overlaid poems by Devon Wootten are appropriations from reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The text draws on the language of the report, Climate Change and Water.