Residue: This Land

We all walk this earth on paths others have walked, on soil where others have lived and died. As a child growing up on over 600 acres of woodlands steeped in Virginia history I was always aware I was walking on others’ lives. Perhaps that is unavoidable when the land on which you play randomly tosses up bullets and other artifacts of war. On this land, and that surrounding it, multiple skirmishes and battles had occurred; the most major of which had resulted in over 86,000 lives lost in just over a one-month period in 1864. This always saddened me as a child. I never found glory in any of it. Reading Pierre Moinot (Le matin vient et aussie la nuit) years later with his words on the costs of war fought on well-loved land in a small French village I resonated with his pondering that those pasts well up generationally.

When my father died in 2014 I began this series of prints. It seemed an appropriate way to honor a man with a lifetime commitment to civil rights work as well as a lifetime commitment to walk lightly in the natural world with gratitude, respect, and awareness of those who have gone before. The series makes use of the ability of the etching process to yield various depths of line, producing in essence time lapses. I was able to ground a plate, draw and etch one time period, reground, and repeat another layer with a doubled timing in the mordant, then again a third time. In that way, I drew from photographs from 1864, from a memory of the 1950-60s, and again from the land as it was in 2015. The resulting prints bear the marks of all three time periods, much like an archeological dig. In some of the prints, there is a rubbing transfer (to a large etching plate, etched, printed) of one of the markers at the battlefield memorial park nearby. In no way should the work be interpreted as a celebration of war or lost causes. Rather it is a commentary on the huge losses we as humans exact on one another, and the horrible legacy that passes on generationally.