Way back, whereas visiting the photographic glass plates of nebulae and constellations on the Harvard Faculty Observatory archives, I used to be overcome by the palpitations of paradox — how we predict that images immortalizes, whereas its very roots are in doing the opposite: making of the ephemeral an phantasm of the everlasting, razing us on the sting of our personal transience as we gasp at the beauty of long-dead flowers and peer on the gentle of long-dead stars.
Artist Meghann Riepenhoff each celebrates and subverts this paradox of temporality in her beautiful cyanotype prints of ice formation, for which she spent 4 years wading into freezing waters throughout this pale blue dot — from Walden Pond to the Seine to the mountain creeks of Western Washington’s old-growth forests — to seize probably the most surreal aspects of actuality: the haunting alchemy of section transition.
On this singular collaboration between human and panorama, she dragged blanket-sized sheets of photographic paper coated with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate — compounds delicate to the blue portion of the spectrum spilling into ultraviolet, developed and glued by solely water and daylight — to emerge with otherworldly photos of crisp crystal lattices and feathery fractals: fluid changing into strong changing into marvel.
Radiating from her prints is a type of magical realism — you peer at these freezing waters, this hallmark of our blue world, and see the atmospheres of different planets, the plumage of a chicken from some undiscovered paradise, the hieroglyphics of some historic civilization encoding elemental knowledge we have now lengthy forgotten.
On the coronary heart of all of it is a layered meditation on time and transformation, on the delicate dance between fluidity and solidity that could be the very best artwork of life, on how one thing, in changing into different, can turn out to be extra absolutely itself.
The ebook companion to the mission, titled Ice, is itself a piece of marvel and unusual magnificence, housed in an all-white slipcase embossed with the silent silhouette of ice formation, devoted “to the water, which makes up all of the beings and locations that made this ebook doable,” and topped with prose by the inimitable Rebecca Solnit, whose “Seven Sentences on the Fluid and the Frozen” punctuate the otherworldly blues.
Within the first and most dazzling of those kaleidoscopic sentences, she builds upon her earlier shimmering reflections on the color blue and writes in a single centuries-long exhale:
Stray canine whose fur had turned vivid blue had been just lately photographed wandering within the snow close to a Russian city, the reason for their coloration regarded as a chemical from an deserted manufacturing unit, one apparently just like the coal gasoline byproduct dumped round Britain for a number of a long time that was a sticky shiny blue substance often called Blue Billy of which a report famous “acute poisonous results of Blue Billy embrace lack of consciousness and respiratory difficulties, as it may possibly restrict the absorption of oxygen on the mobile stage,” and with this naming the substance appeared to tackle the traits of a person, an unpredictable one who modified roles as he modified associates, as he typically did, for the reason that similar underlying substance, cyanide, compounded with sodium, was used to leach microscopic gold out of huge portions of pulverized earth in jap Nevada and as soon as the toxic liquid had pulled out the gold, there have been lakes of it that the mining companies had been supposed to maintain the birds from touchdown on, however since they self-monitored, what number of birds died from touchdown in artifical lakes of poison is unknown, and hydrogen cyanide which in its pure type is a liquid that boils at 78 levels Fahrenheit was the poison in poison tablets that numerous Nazis used to kill themselves, and in Zyklon B, the pesticide used to kill greater than one million human beings in Auschwitz (Zyklon being German for cyclone, B brief for Blausäure, or blue acid, what we name Prussic acid in English), and so go a couple of of the various lethal issues this cyanide does, however the substance shouldn’t be solely a poison, not solely a destroyer, as a result of it’s a part of the primary artificial coloration often called Prussian blue that the Encyclopedia Brittanica notes “was first synthesized about 1704 by the response of salts of iron within the +2 oxidation state (ferrous salts) with potassium ferrocyanide,” and the identical Prussian blue could be given to human beings as a “capsule that may assist take away radioactive cesium and thallium from folks’s our bodies,” says a authorities web site that additionally warns that breaking open the tablets earlier than swallowing will flip tooth and mouths blue: cyanide’s identify comes from cyan, that Greek phrase for blue that I someway hook up with each cynicism and cygnets (the time period for child swans), the blue of stray canine, of lakes, of poisons and cures for worse poisons, the blue of distance, the blue and blue legal guidelines, of blue mouths and harmful blue mud, of the cyanotype photograms of seaweed specimens by Anna Atkins that she compiled into what is usually described as the primary photographic ebook, and the blue of the pictures on this ebook.
Complement with the nice Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd on water as a portal to transcendence and this beautiful Japanese illustrated poem celebrating water, then revisit two centuries of nice writers — from Goethe and Thoreau to Toni Morrison and Rebecca Solnit — reverencing the color blue.
