Range
Range
2017
This summer my sister and I camped along the east side of the Sierras where the dynamics of geology are exposed: tilted layers of rock that once were at the bottom of the ocean are now 10,000 feet above sea level.
Geology has a time frame that is huge and long, slow and also sudden. In San Francisco we wait for and also continually forget that swift and demolishing shift that can happen at any time. Geology also has a scale the can’t be measured easily with the hands, the eyes, or even the imagination.
Taking in the vast reach, deep weight, atom-measured time, cataclysmic force, and clamped potential of those steep, jagged peaks is kind of ridiculous. We are little worms. And this rocky place is home. Water is held in ice fields and glaciers, and then dumps down ravines, jumbles over bouldery cliffs, and blooms into aspen groves, meadows, lodgepole pines, and mountain heather.
The mountain range of a spine is part of our personal geography, between left and right. Also made of minerals, it creates our own watershed in the shower. A single drawn line in each piece describes this craggy and faulted crest, a human scale spine as subtext. Beyond the body is our context: the earth as the larger body. The minerals of the earth are ancestral – we are made from this crust.
The intent is not to describe what the Sierras look like but to express what it feels like to try to understand these mountains through the body, as a body, as an animal.
For a moment in these mountains, all distress over human travesties was bowled over to witness this range as it continues to unfold with its rubble and upthrust, slant, cleave and hoist.