Subterranean †valley 2, 2017
154.5×95.4 cm / 60.8 × 37.6 in
Archival Giclee Print

何万年、何十万年という長い時間をかけてつくられた渓谷の景観。その経過を数百枚の写真を使って辿ってみました。
横たわる動物、草木、石… 自然のマテリアルを撮影し、土の上に息絶えた動物を、その上に雨が降り土砂が被さり草木が生え、様々な動植物が通り、時には地震や嵐に晒されて地形が変わる様を写真を重ねていくことで時間の流れをなぞった。わずかに地形に痕跡が残るようマスクをかけながらベースとなる地面を形成し岩や苔、草木を組み合わせて景観をつくっていく工程のほとんどは最終的な仕上がりには現れないが、けっして無意味ではなかった。数万年という長い時間の経過を1枚の写真に落とし込むには、この手法（愚直に想像できる限りのマテリアルを重ねていく方法）が必要だった。ディテールをあきらかにする為、最後に多灯ライティングを施し地形そのものを標本化したようなルックに仕上げた。

A valley landscape takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years to create. With this piece, I tried to trace that development through hundreds of individual photos. Animals lying prone, plants, stones… by layering photographs of these natural materials atop one another, I explore the riddle of time’s passage, exemplified by the soil where a variety of creatures spent their last breath. Their remains are buried by rain-moistened overlying sediment, itself covered with growing vegetation that allows for the passage of a greater amount of natural life, and occasionally exposed by wind and earthquakes. Though I applied a mask to preserve traces of each image, they were barely visible after completing the process of combining boulders, moss, and grass to create the ground at the base of the work. However, that process was not without meaning. Such a technique (of layering with simple honesty those elements that can be conceived by the imagination) was necessary in order to imbue a single photo with the weight of hundreds of thousands of years of time. To clarify the details, the final act was to use multiple sources of lighting to make the terrain look as if it had been sampled from another source.