This new project is based on images I took in the Atacama desert, northern Chile and refers to a multitude of landscape imagery from early prints of Mount Fuji by 18th century Japanese printmakers to the photographs of hidden satellites in the nightsky by Trevor Paglin. The image is of a volcano that sits behind a lake at 4,500 m high on the Chilean Altiplano, on the other side of which is Argentina. It was a place of great significance to the Inca tribes who buried their chosen children in their depths in sacrificial rituals. Some of these bodies have been found, perfectly preserved. Close by you can find all the most important astronomical observatories, as it is here that the sky is cleanest, and where the desert is the most arid in the world. While observing the beginnings of the earth through astronomy, down below nothing grows, no life exists, except for the salt crystal lakes and algae. This place is one of the most desolate I have ever been to, hiding its violent beginnings behind a silent otherwordliness. I am making a series of prints with acetone transfer and photoetching on Japanese paper. The project continues my enquiry into landscapes of the disappeared: the impermanence of the transfer is coupled with a more permanent substrate in the etching, while the Japanese paper adds to its fragile quality. To accompany the series I am putting together a series of hand made photobooks.

Having taken a photograph of a video still, I then printed and photocopied the image, then transferred it onto Japanese paper and scanned it. The next step was to create a collage of several versions of this image and then rescanned and transfer that with acetone on the press. This final image was then printed out digitally in a large format, 100 x 200 cm: