Media: Powdered water filtration charcoal + spit rubbed onto gypsum with take-away broadsheet.

Applying a mix of digestible carbon with saliva, a body rubs repeatedly on the wall—designating the surface of the wall as both stand-in for the skin and recipient of carbon residue. The resulting mark is accompanied by a broadsheet with a microphotograph of a geological sample on one side and an experimental text on the other. The broadsheet that accompanies the wall drawing links this gesture to a larger context of landscape and time (through the photomicrograph of the mud core sample), making connections between body and earth, decay and degradation, and the new geological epoch, understood as the indelible mark of human devastation of the environment.

I began this project as part of a residency I did at the Drawing Center in NY, during which time I was researching and thinking about the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene articulates the scale of human-driven changes in the environment that are associated with mass extinction events and much longer geological timelines. I was trying to understand this term the way a geologist might—as a layer visible in the terrain of the earth—a kind of collective mark-making. And I thought it would be useful for me to try to reckon with this on the scale of the mark-making I know best as an artist—drawing.  

During this phase in the research, I attended a lecture by Elizabeth Povinelli, where she was using the phrase “epidermal imaginary”—referring to the compelling, yet erroneous idea that our skin is an impermeable barrier and that we have control over what is inside and outside of our bodies. I recognized the cognitive dissonance that I had around this and began to understand my body,—and all vulnerable bodies—as more permeable.

To create the installation, I apply a mix of digestible carbon with saliva and rub my body repeatedly on the wall, which leaves an indexical trace of the contact between my skin and the wall, rubbing the carbon into the wall as it rubs into my body. The carbon has obvious connotations of life, death and toxicity.

Yussi Parikka, in his book, Geology of Media, in a chapter called “Dust and Exhausted Life,” proposes thinking of landscape as not something out-there and visible, but inside us as well, and invisible. Parikka talks about hybrid materials like dust and particulate matter—and particularly addresses the kinds of materials that might make up this new geological strata—things that we throw in our trash that don’t go away and that are particular to our contemporary existence. The language for the broadsheet comes from both researching and imagining this new geological layer.