I grew up in a rural landscape where I had personal experiences with agriculture, both witnessing and taking part in my family’s attention to and care for the land. Through the performance of plowing and burning fields for new growth, I became attached to these acts of deconstruction as preparation for transformation. I am captivated by the pause after the field is plowed, the moment between overturning the past and entering an unknown.   

[  “Photographs operate something like ruins,” Walead Beshty says. “Despite their seeming stasis, they are available to a multitude of narratives, slipping effortlessly between them.”   ]

In my recent work, I investigate the surface of hydro cal plaster to create a hybrid of painting and photography through embedded textures, paint, and photo transfer. I am interested in the history of painting and photography and both medium’s urge to capture nature. I find this task both daunting and liberating because the vast experience of nature can never be completely contained. Instead, what is lost in the attempt to document brings an understanding of unknowns within me. These conceptual explorations overlap with the transformative process of the plaster. In the process, the liquid plaster absorbs the ink of the image; in this transition color and details are lost in translation. In this shift of material state, the plaster and photo produce an object with ephemerality that speaks to memory, time, and the healing cycles of the natural world. I choose plaster not only for the fluidity and possibility it offers, but its connotation as a fragment, an artifact, and an object. While I construct, I am questioning what is the residue of the surface? What is left and what isn’t there that can tell us about what is deeper below the surface of our self, our healing, and our cultivation?

-Emma Barnes