Forensics of the Land

Photographic works documenting the effects of elements of nature on objects left to deteriorate.

A lonely dirt road cuts through the empty space of a windswept volcanic plateau. The bare markings that leave a trace of where automobiles traverse the earth’s surface. I am moved by the scudding skies and icy winds of this primal landscape and what it reveals in a cemetery for abandoned vehicles.

This series is about observing traces that map the markings by the weather and made visible on the faded painted surfaces of discarded automobiles. Early relics of the anthropocene that mark our current epoch, like spectres at the dawn of the sixth mass extinction. Photographing these surfaces is an attempt to record something of our planet’s current milieu, like a set of time-rubbings. Here nature is actively at work painting with her own hand upon the industrial. Its surface becoming both an entropic canvas and a frame through which to view our current age, one created by oil, metal and man.

Uncovered in an isolated junkyard, each vehicle and its surface reveals itself as a kind of time capsule.

A date, a make, a model found in its current state of decay, containing memories of lives and stories from unknown journeys through forgotten topographies. Their decaying surfaces reveal virtual maps to the world they inhabit and perhaps more deeply the subconscious forces of human endeavour that they in turn might represent.

These surfaces also reveal something beyond a simple record of the traces of humankind to represent themselves more pointedly, in a self reflexive way, toward the art of painting, here made by the clouds themselves to form a miniature view of the landscape they have been discovered in and to which they are returning to. Presenting within themselves a type of abstract view of a very weird country.

Andrei Jewell, 2018

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