Fifteen Stones

Exhibition: June 28-August 17, 2025, at Photographic Center Northwest

The stone garden at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto is one the most renowned examples of the dry rock gardens (Kare-sansui) in Japan. The garden is a rectangular-shaped expanse of raked gravel containing fifteen stones, grouped in five clusters. While there has been endless discussion about the meaning of this garden, part of its appeal to me is its resistance to interpretation. The garden also invites me to contemplate the Heart Sutra, which includes the lines: “Form does not differ from emptiness; Emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.” 

In this photographic installation, I use the stone garden at Ryōan-ji to inspire an exploration of figure and ground, and the ambiguities of visual perception. Images of river rocks are printed using a platinum/palladium process in which the light-sensitized coating, bushed by hand onto the paper, delineates the edges of the visible while at same time echoing the forms of the stones. Does what we choose to see determine what is seen, or could it be the reverse? Large-scale images of fields of grass immerse me in the emptiness that surrounds form, but at the same time I am fascinated by the swirls of detail. This installation translates the garden into a visual meditation, a photographic search for both the duality of form and emptiness, and their unity. 

Platinum/palladium printing is among most durable of printing processes, producing prints with a potential longevity of hundreds of years if handled and stored properly. Photo peel is a peel-and-stick single-use product made of polyvinyl chloride. The contrast between permanent and the ephemeral is an interesting but tricky one, both in photographic processes and in nature. Grassy meadows are renewed every spring, while rocks will eventually erode to nothingness.