As Above, So Below

Recent exhibitions by Anne Noble and Kate van der Drift engage endangered ecologies by exposing photographic film, not to light, but to chemicals in fragile environments. Film is buried underground or in wetlands for a period, and then unearthed, cleaned, processed and printed. The resulting cameraless abstractions—spooky, even cosmic in appearance—make visible the often unseen impacts of the Anthropocene and offer personal responses grounded in a form of critical poetics.

Anne Noble’s Observations from the Critical Zone was created by burying a roll of film in the topsoil—the so-called ‘critical zone’—between two trees. In her exhibition text for Two Rooms the artist describes this critical zone as ‘a descriptor for that living, breathing, near surface layer of the earth that is experiencing catastrophic (and invisible) loss of biodiversity’.¹ A leading cause of this invisible catastrophe is the intensive use of herbicides and other toxicants, compounded by the multifaceted and accumulative impacts of climate change.

Attempting to address these unseen phenomena, Noble’s six large prints make visible the traces of underground chemical reactions. The artist’s film was buried for 330 hours and then excavated, dried, brushed, gently washed, developed and scanned. The resulting rusty brown palette appears distinctly earthy, punctuated with regions of black in which the film emulsion has been completely eaten away by the chemical environment. The colour profile of Noble’s scanner was balanced for human skin tone in daylight,