Past Work — Jerry H. Slough

Creation and Destruction 2016

Creation and Destruction: In Southern California we exist in a perpetual state of drought. Water is scarce, but it is essential to our lives. Water nourishes the plants that support the birds, bees, butterflies, and all wild life. Water creates the landscape. Creeks, streams, and rivers carve hills, canyons, and valleys over time. The crashing ocean waves carve our coastline. In this constant process of giving life and then altering it, water shapes our lives and our world.

Creation: Creation started as a desire to work with older photographic processes. Cyanotype is an early form of developing photographic prints. For this project, I mixed the chemicals with water, coated paper with them to make the paper sensitive to light, then developed the images using water. In this sense the photographs are created by water. The images follow the Escondido Creek watershed from the inland Elfin Forest to its end point where the it meets the ocean at the San Elijo Lagoon. Photographs of the bodies of water and the life the water creates.

Destruction: Destruction began as traditional color prints of waves crashing into and shaping the shoreline. Then, in small batches I placed those prints into ocean water that I collected from the same beach where they were created. The salt water damages the prints and separates the emulsion layers from one another. The images that are left are a result of their interaction with salt water and the other prints. The water created a new image, one of its own design. There was no digital manipulation to these after they were originally printed. These photographs have been shaped by the very waves from which they were created.

Together, these two seemingly unrelated projects are part of one— exploring the physical properties of a substance so necessary for life to flourish, and looking at the cyclical nature of life, creation and destruction.