The Monolith Project
The Monolith Project
2014-2015
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this project started more than twenty years ago. My fascination with powerful landforms, often articulated as naturally occurring monolithic structures, has been an abiding one for many years. There is a passage by Gary Snyder that has been important to me for a long time. In Good Wild Sacred, he says the following:
Certain places are perceived to be of high spiritual density because of plant or animal habitat intensities, or associations with legend, or connections with human totemic ancestry, or because of geomorphological anomaly, or some combination of qualities. These places are gates through which one can—it would be said—more easily enter a larger-than human, larger-than-personal realm.
To put it another way, the places I’m responding to are wild in a powerful, mysterious, and commanding way. And not wild as in wilderness (although some of these images were made deep in the backcountry of Colorado) but wild as in scary and unknowable, while at the same time irrepressibly inviting and seductive. That kind of wild seems to explode out of the forest floor without warning, a geologic being that won’t be ignored. Or a wild that has recently (by the standards of geologic time) splintered from a cliff above, coming down catastrophic and thunderous to balance itself precariously on the valley’s bottom. These are the kinds of places that the ancients were drawn to, the kinds of places where burial sites and petroglyphs sometimes turn up. Not the standing stones of the British Isles, but naturally occurring monoliths that surprise, challenge, and sometimes almost frighten the human imagination.