Crossing multiple disciplines, such as geology, geography, cartography, archaeology, and astronomy, Elena Damiani has explored changes occurring over enormous spans of time that can be seen in material and landscapes. Her art reveals a person trying to intellectually fathom the earth and the wide array of material structures that change on scales that far exceed the human lifespan.
Her archetypal “Relieve” series reminds us of how landforms are created through a process in which precipitation causes sand and minerals to change form, and then dry and harden once more. The geometrical onyx oloids that have left trails in the soil represent materials that change form on geological time scales in response to the environment. In this work, which is part of the same series, the artist uses loess, a local material containing the gairome clay that has supported Seto’s ceramic industry, as well as silica sand and iron oxide. While these raw materials appear immutable at first glance, they actually assumed their present form after undergoing weathering and sedimentation, processes of material and chemical decomposition that take place over the course of incredibly long periods of time.
Making trails, swaying right and left, it is as if these handmade oloids are tracing the constant change undergone by these materials. Damiani’s projects make visible the incredibly long processes hidden within the material world that we tend to view as static and fixed, and reinterpret them from a different perspective involving geological time and history along with human activity, which is intricately connected to them.