The images and sounds in the series excerpted here depict aspects of Stromboli, the Italian volcanic island where my greatgrandparents lived and farmed before immigrating to Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Stromboli has always held a near-mythological allure for me, not only when cited as the floating home of Aeolus, the keeper of the winds – but also in its family context, as a fertile and unstable ground for farming and living, a constant torsion of beauty and precarity. For years, a small jar of black volcanic sand and a few stones that my grandmother brought back when she visited Stromboli sat on the ledge above the sink in her kitchen under a stained glass image of the Brooklyn bridge – next to a wooden cross, small troll doll, and a bowl of pine cones. Having never been to the island, I am left with a long series of abstractions to make sense of – narratives passed down by generations of family members; small geological artifacts transported in suitcases; and image, sound, and video files available in the public domain.

Excerpted from flatbed and 3D scans of sand and stone, webcam videos of eruptions, and screenshots of 360º maps, these images stage an incomplete recollection of a familial landscape – obscured by systems of noise, approximation, and digital distance-making. By pushing digital images of natural textures (both public and private) towards and through printmaking, darkroom manipulation, and sound processing - there is a fleeting reconvening with the physical/dimensional that is informed by family memory but also necessarily imagined, abstracted, and porous.

Exposing these digital translations on to photographic paper or photopolymer plates serves to physically harden a set of momentary image fragments that otherwise lack some degree of visual depth. As ethereal and at times figural forms emerge from these obtusely recorded and replicated geological occurrences, they become charged with a reference to some real or imagined spiritual context and connection - considering geological and familial timescales far beyond the immediate, and suggesting possibilities for alternate time structures, mythologies, memories, and fictions.