frenchmanscreek

‘Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note. It is the highest light. It is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.’

G.K. Chesterton, 1910

The Red Creek, Spring 2020 | C-Type Digital Print | POA

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being growth with reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Charles Darwin

Origin of Species, 1860

The Red Creek, Spring 2020 | C-Type Digital Print | POA

Red Creek is a project of entanglements: ecological, temporal, material, imaginary. Flooded daily by the sea, the Creek has a complex ever-changing ecosystem...Life and death continually fold into each other and metamorphosize. It is rare to encounter other visitors and walkers in the valley, even in the summer months. The entangled trees muffle the close presence of contemporary living and, for a brief moment, it is possible to fantasize the creek as a place of primal wilderness. This illusion is always broken, continually rippled by historical traces of human activity, consumption and its wastes.

Extract of text from Entanglements by Lizzie Perrote [limited edition zine]

The Red Creek, Spring 2020 | C-Type Digital Print | POA