III. INTRUSION

The purpose of this work is to take a leap of faith with our process. It’s about letting the components of the process be agents of authorship. It’s about letting them be what they really are -- substrates and solvents, mechanisms of revealing and resolving, fibers and light-adhering metal, and varnish which either covers and preserves the image or smears and un-does it, however chance will have it. The vagaries of the process, in turn, are how we tell the true story of the change engulfing our world.

Intrusion is undermining the coastal forests of the Southeast. Salt with its sharp chemistry is coming up through the sand soils, and these fortresses of the natural system, which guarded the land, and held the stitched margin of the sea and the barrier islands together, are giving way. Soon they’ll be erased places. Their oaken-armed and pine-tall blazonry has an altered meaning now. What was once just the world, the beautiful system that we were a part of, and with which we shared an immediate life, is turning into a memory. It’s a record. Reading it is becoming the story of what was, not the telling of what is. All structure is the same, the natural system and the electrical life of the cellular world underneath our consciousness. The forces that alter it are the same too. The system is us, which is something we forgot on the long journey into the labyrinth which we told ourselves was enlightenment. What we do to the system we have done to ourselves. And that’s called a self-portrait.