Slate

This is a body of work of listening and of language. Of environments and our position in them. Our planet is changing rapidly — humankind has been tasked with reconfiguring its relationship with the natural world. We know we’re failing. It’s clear that long-held hierarchies are unbalanced and that communication between us, and everything else, is broken.

Slate introduces a guiding question: what emerges when we’re forced to start over? The book is a recording of discovery, engaging the act of seeing to deepen respect for the more-than-human world, imagining a world with a protagonist asked to wander by some greater authority. He’s been stripped of a known language and must document the building blocks — gesture, form, color, pattern — embedded in his observed environments in an effort to create a language based on an emergent hierarchy.

Photography and graphic design are inseparably linked as modes of discovery and documentation. The book presents ciphers embedded in the landscape of its form, left for a reader to decode and use as necessary. To return to when these marks’ significance shifts from indecipherable to shimmery to…an awakening. The project is an attempt to question existing mappings and ways of structuring the world. What does it feel like to be completely lost, both in the world and in a body of work — and return to a place of bewilderment?