Catherine Chan: Fractures and Futures

Philopatry, originally an ornithological term, refers to the site-faithful tendency of an animal to return to the area in which it was born. The rocks in this installation, each 360 to 540 million years old, were collected by the artist, then broken in fire and repaired using Kintsugi-inspired techniques. The mended rocks are placed in proximity to a photograph that depicts them in their home—the shingles beach where the artist and her siblings spent much of their childhood learning to skip rocks from their dad. The hand appears to be simultaneously picking up and putting back the repaired rocks: taking and giving, leaving and coming home.

Donna Haraway speaks about the present as “a thick, complex tangle of times and places in which cultivating response-abilities, capacities to respond, matters,” influenced by Deborah Bird Rose and her work with Australian Aboriginal teachers from the Yarralin community in the Northern Territory of Australia (Haraway and Tsing 2019).

The thickness of the present encompasses the entanglement of ancestors, human and more-than-human living beings, and landscapes, as well as the responsibility of living people to acknowledge the past and make repairs for those who come after, “to make kin in new and old ways.”

Care, Repair, and The Passage of Time acknowledges that the repair of fractured rocks will never return them to their original state. Stepping into deep time, however, may offer a glimpse of how to offer care, make kin in the ‘thick present’, and point to ways of living that have yet to exist.

Borrowing its title from a Canadian geology textbook, Four Billion Years and Counting considers the affinities of beings with unique histories and experiences. The installation comprises a constellation of found and made matter from various time periods—rocks and minerals of geologic age alongside handmade and altered forms from the present. Here, the artist is a maker and collector, as well as a curator or carer, harkening to the etymological root word ‘curatus’ as ‘one responsible for the care of souls’. Emerging from proximity and similitude among constituent beings, billions of years of embedded narratives are compressed into a communion of simultaneous existence.

A Precambrian rock from the Canadian Shield is suspended from a well wheel pulley, invoking a deep well where wishes are spoken into the Earth. This installation also references the vertical geologic coring commonly carried out for scientific purposes such as paleoenvironmental reconstruction used to determine the age and conditions of the Earth. Incorporating materials that are 1.45 to 1.35 billion years old, Wishing Well extends above us, suggesting that we are at the bottom, looking up from within deep time.

Prototype for a Perfect Future II is a representation of time based on rock records. Geologic time scales are often drawn linearly in a vertical orientation, divided into geochronological units such as eons, eras, and epochs, starting with the present time at the top.

In Prototype for a Perfect Future II, time is portrayed upside down with the oldest time (the Hadean eon) at the top and the present time (the Holocene epoch) at the bottom. Each of the segments are scale representations of geologic subdivisions of time. The collage is comprised of photographs taken from a catalog for landscaping stones, blending images of real rocks quarried from around the world with segments made of gold leaf, a reference to the ‘golden spike’ marker of the Anthropocene found in this region of the world.

Prototype for a Perfect Future I is a Precambrian rock from the Canadian Shield that has broken apart through heating and cooling and freeze-thaw cycles. This rock was gathered by the artist and two of its sections have been repaired using a ‘fast’ method of epoxy mixed with gold-coloured pigment. In contrast to the mindful, weeks-long technique of traditional Kintsugi using urushi and gold, the quick mending of this rock occurs in even greater disparity to the eons of time the rock has existed, like a bandage solution for a rupture that has been centuries in the making.