Origo
- 2019Thick smoke rolls out toward the viewer from between holes and canyons in expansive grey rock. Strong winds blow between the forms while they stretch and creak like a calving glacier.
We traverse the rocks shot by shot getting further away from the first until we encounter a vision of the “Grotto”. This marks my obsessive return to an image that struck me from a single shot in Tacita Dean’s Antigone (an experimental 35mm film shown as two simultaneous projections) - a shot introducing me to the Grotto geyser in Yellowstone National Park. The sinuous aperture forms created from erupting over ancient tree trunks.
Now, from its dormant state we cut to a lone white particle in a vast blackness of space, outside the perception of reality. A sci-fi ringing noise emanates from it, mist swirling into it, sucked in by its gravity.
Something changes. Back to the canyons of stone, the ringing sound picks up and smoke is reeled back in between the rocks until drawn into silence. A loud bang echoes back religiously three times and the smoke starts rolling back out.
This time just the sound of soft wind is heard as the smoke travels back through all the bumps and channels in the stone towards us.