JILL BEMIS | My Childhood Rock Collection (Doane Rock), 2023

This work is my means of exploring human impermanence and landscape, as well as their intersections with the photographic process. Through the lenses of geologic rock, human experience, and the photographic object, this work tries to examine the persistent and often painful march of time, its pace and effects felt disparately by each. This work began as I looked to glacial boulders for a sense of permanency in a time of societal turmoil during and following the pandemic. I had been overcome by the sense of lost time and life as I was also being greeted uncomfortably by my thirties. A stone's experience of time is seemingly slower and more certain instead of the ever quickening and chaotic human temporal experience. As I work with the rock collections of those close to me, they act as a bridge between geological and human timelines. In the darkroom I focus on experimental printing methods, such as combining traditional printing and photograms. I started intentionally printing on expired silver gelatin paper that was gifted to me and then sat unused for more than a decade. This has been a process of combining my own artistic choices with the effects that time has had on my materials.

BIO

Jill is an interdisciplinary artist with roots in analog photography. Growing up along the coastal marshland of Massachusetts has had perhaps the biggest impact on her art-making practice; the tide gifted Jill an example of slowness, rhythm, and mystery. Jill received an MFA from Lesley University where she was awarded a grant from the Photographic Resource Center (PRC), and a teaching fellowship. She currently is an adjunct professor of Art in the Boston area.