Grave of A.P. Coleman
2017–2019Series of over thirty digital C-prints, dimensions variable.
Part of Vertical Frontier.
Arthur P. Coleman was one of Canada’s pre-eminent geologists, credited with significant contributions to his field in charting the geology of the Canadian Rockies, Southern Ontario, the Arctic, and to theories of glaciation more broadly. This project involved photographing Coleman’s grave in all seasons for two years, documenting the effects of light and weather on its (apparently) unchanging surface. In doing so, three irreconcilable temporalities converge: the deep time of geology; the time of death, mourning, and memorialization; and the human time of daily life and changing seasons. If photography is largely involved in capturing fleeting moments, the medium is here employed ironically to record the mutable effects of weather on a gravestone that implicates itself in the deep time of the planet.
