about the designs (and our obsession with deep time)

You may have never looked at a leaf or a rock the way a scientific illustrator does. Hours on one specimen. Every vein accounted for in detail. It was slow and exacting work, done on the belief that looking at something for a very long time and taking in its minutiae is a way of better understanding it. We agree.

Every piece begins the same way: with an archival illustration or scientific plate. A botanical study, a geological survey, an alluvial map. From it we take a particular detail or two, blow it up to an enormous size, and color it boldly-- half to glorify nature's splendor, half to envision new landscapes. 

Across the work and the real subject is always, quietly, time. Deep time - geologic time. The permanence of change. A landscape still mid-negotiation with the elements, always in flux in the time scale of millennia. Deep time is not the threat of oblivion or extinction. It is forced perspective that all things change and that even destruction is a form of creation. Deconstruction, erasure of context, tearing out and sharing -- it is all expected and welcomed. And beautiful.

The art prints take the idea to full size: for instance: an antique geologic map manipulated and processed as a cyanotype, white on shades of prussian blue, until a map of rock crests like the water that made it. The lines between solid and liquid, blurred by deep time. The note cards and journals bring it down to the hand. They are made for people who read, write, and notice details in all the weirdest places: the footnote, the fold, the lining of an envelope. The people who love to read old books and letters and diaries as a window to a world or a feeling gone by. A letter, as we see it, is a margin note that gets to travel, written alongside something loved and sent to a friend.