I’ve struggled with how to frame this project, how to say that making photograms of my mother’s cremains is simultaneously the most abstract and most literal treatment of existence I can imagine. In the pitch black of the color darkroom I work with what’s left of a life, tapping senses beyond sight to make meaning from randomized arrangements of particulate matter. I brought Mom to the darkroom with longing to extract feeling from a gray plastic box of pulverized bone fragments. That utilitarian box, a gift of my parents’ coldly rational determination to prearrange their own disposal, would seem to underline a mean fact: that our lives barely register as planetary dust in geologic time.
And yet this dust, this legacy, precedes and outlasts our corporeal form. We are temporal beings in an elemental zone made not by us but of us, a constantly regenerating cast of particles—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus—birthed 14 billion years ago by burning stars in an exploding cosmos. We are everything that has ever been and everyone who has ever lived, constantly reforming through interactions with air, plants, animals, and minerals. Transience being the order of all things, change and death may be somewhat disarmed as cause for anxiety. We were here when Earth was formed, and we remain as it dies.
Our visible universe expanded this year with images relayed by the Webb telescope, which blindly focuses on thermal energy and makes monochrome photos using infrared light in a wavelength beyond our ability to see. Color filters are applied to register density and depth, rendering dimensional images of particle bodies in space so deep it is outside our reckoning of time. Dialing cyan, magenta, and yellow filters on color enlargers similarly reveals density and depth in randomized arrangements of beige-gray cremains.
Like space, the dominant constituent of human form is emptiness, air, an inflated visage of self that evaporates when 1400 degrees of heat engulfs the deceased. And we revert to dust, calcified remains of bones that framed a life. But what dust we are.