Nalani Knauss

The experience of coming and going between The Hague and the rolling hills of California is a process of attachment and separation. A letting go, like concretions that were once embedded, and are now transported. In my search for belonging, I explore landscapes in the eternally shifting forms of dirt, earth, clay, and rock. Clay solidifies into s-shapes and curves, gurgles, migrates, deposits, and disintegrates.  

I cannot bury or submerge myself in soil, crawl back into the womb of comfort, or hold onto the feeling of being cradled which my body craves. The sense of belonging cannot be held captive. It has no shape or form.  

Using analog photography, I document my search using foraging as a methodology of pondering and wandering, gathering and gleaning, touching and making. My work connects the human form to the deterioration of the rock body. 

 Gathering and gleaning while cultivating a dialogue with rocky terrain fulfills the desire to be connected. What does it mean to be held by rock and how do we hold rock? Rethinking soil as part of the animate world, makes it a body, a language. In our physicality, we can reconnect to the soil body. Through subtle, tactile experience the shape of belonging can be felt in the weathered strata of sedimentary, eroded rock. Over time, can we learn to touch with our eyes and see with our hands? Can we collectively dig deeper into our relationality with earth?