The Landskin series uses aerial maps of the surfaces of New Mexico cleansed of all superimposed information including grid lines, numbers and place names. Geologic content remains after political and geometric overlays are digitally removed. Without a proper guide for context or scale, the earth surfaces become abstract fields that share the dendritic patterns found at the skin surfaces of the human body. These shared patterns on macro and micro scales reinforce a kind of unity expressed through compliance with physical forces. These common physical rules give the same shape to rivers of water as to arteries of blood or veins of a leaf.
To accentuate skin-like qualities, the images are printed using warm brown emulsion on thin and delicate tracing paper. The highly distressed paper shows signs of the wet and dry cycles it endures during processing, which mimic the erosional role of water in creating the patterns imaged and the stretch marks and wrinkles common to our bodies.
Having produced the series as wall pieces, I also created an installation to show the prints floating in water baths with light and air supplied as if in a life-support system.
