Clay #3, 2019
Clay #9, 2019
Clay #6, 2019
Clay #1, 2019
Clay #4, 2019
CLAY
Cape Cod is a narrow peninsula thrust into the Atlantic Ocean like a flexed arm, a pile of sand, rock and clay left behind by the retreat of the last glaciers over 15,000 years ago. Wind and rain originally eroded and shaped it for thousands of years, until sea level rose high enough for the ocean to begin doing the same some 6,000 years ago. It's a place in constant movement and flux, especially during frequent winter storms, which can remove several feet of the outer shore in a winter's time.
Erosion reshapes the beaches and exposes geologic layers previously hidden beneath the sand. Every year, something new is revealed, and in 2019 at Ballston Beach in Truro, large clay deposits, as if by magic, suddenly appeared. There was a window of only a number of weeks before they too were eroded by the tides, simply gone forever, dissolved into the sea. It felt at the time like a precious gift being there to witness and photograph the clay that had magically appeared for such a brief time.
And it's reassuring to me that the pictures I took formed a series of photogravures, prints made by hand with carbon-based ink, as elemental and long-lived a process as exists in photography. The Clay Series is comprised of ten images in editions of five impressions each, printed with a photogravure plate, on an etching press, using traditional etching ink on 15x22 rag paper.