Temporal Undulations: Topography of a Meteorite
Temporal Undulations: Topography of a Meteorite sets photographic prints beside a 3D print made from the same photogrammetric scan of a meteorite. The work draws on Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject, a thing too vast in time and space for us to hold in mind.
Temporal Undulations: Topography of a Meteorite uses expanded photographic practice to question how we read the natural world. The work began with 350 photographs of a meteorite, assembled through digital photogrammetry into a three-dimensional model and then printed as a physical object. Photographic prints show a section of that scanned surface, framed and lit as a black and white landscape. They borrow directly from Ansel Adams’ Monolith, the Face of Half Dome (1927). What reads as a mountain rising against a black sky is a small fragment of meteorite, photographed in a genre built for a far larger scale.
The title comes from Timothy Morton. In Hyperobjects (2013) and Dark Ecology (2016), Morton describes things so large in time and space that they can never be seen whole. Temporal undulation is one of the properties he gives them, and his central example is global warming. A meteorite carries a similar weight of time. It sits in front of us as a physical object, while the span of time it records lies far outside human experience.
Most viewers come to a photograph expecting it to show them what something is. Here that expectation works against them. The surface first reads as a mountain, dark peaks against a black sky. Closer attention turns it back into what it is, a piece of rock that reached the earth from outside it. The 3D print sits beside the photograph as a correction, returning the object to something nearer its real scale and form.
The meteorite stands in for something closer to home. Climate change is present and measurable, and still too large for us to grasp. The work asks how much of what we recognise in an image belongs to the subject, and how much is the genre doing its familiar work.