Litho Domous – The Geological Unconscious

Photographic books plates from vintage books are layered onto lighting panels, utilising the ‘bleed’ between them to evoke the tectonic instabilities of contemporary eco relations. Designed as statement pieces for home display, the aspirational focus on culture, travel, landscape, of these image-rich publications prefigure the arc of the smartphone in making the world consumable. Titles such as ‘The Mineral Kingdom’  speak to the legacies of the Enlightenment project, offering up an order of things in which Mankind / the Anglophone world is positioned as ascendant and Nature is ‘put on the table’. The images selected conjure a pre-fall world in which imaginaries of lithic instability are firmly suppressed, unified in their varying representations of the geologic but broking no contradiction between their celebration of extractive processes and idealisation of the ‘wild’. By disassembling these books and ghosting one page on top of another the ontological framework they represent is unsettled evoking a return of the Mineral repressed which speaks to both the precarity of anthropogenic climate change and relational entanglements of our ‘dwelling in rocks’.