Memories of the Soil, 2020, mixed media painting on board, 50x70cm 

“The land archives its memories in many media; a long-lived tree, for example, records the human signal on the atmosphere through centuries of time (Hartley, 2010). But its longest, most lasting and indelible memories are recorded in the soil (Richter and Yaalon, 2012; Lin, 2011; Richter et al., 2011). People come and go, trees will burn or rot away, but the soil stays, and the soil remembers.
The soil is at the confluence of energy and matter fluxes in the ecosystem (Targulian and Sokolova, 1996). Most of the solar energy trapped by photosynthesis in carbonaceous molecules passes through the soil; the nutrients coursing through the ecosystem stream through the soil in endless cycles; pollutants released into the sky are neutralized within the soil. And in their passing through, the energy, the nutrients, the pollutants leave behind a trace, indelibly etched into the memory of the soil, recorded there in chemical, isotopic, biological, and physical script. Today’s analysis of a soil reveals its instantaneous construct, but the time-attuned analyst sees in that moment the residues of centuries. By virtue of its memory, the soil is a seamless continuum, connecting ecosystems not only over space but also over time. By careful reading of the soil, then, the landscape becomes a “timescape” (Buell, 2001, p. 77).
Perhaps the soils’ most illuminating memories are those of things once living, recorded in organic matter. The “decay of animal and vegetable matter,” said Burroughs (1908, p. 199–213), long ago, is the process “that gives the humus to the soil, in fact, almost humanizes it, making it tender and full of sentiment and memories, as it were, so that it responds more quickly to our needs and to our culture. The elements of the soil remember all those forms of animal and vegetable life of which they once made a part, and they take them on again the more readily.” The study of soil organic matter, then, is really a study of biotic memories, of how living things, whether bacteria or people, reshape and are themselves reshaped by their habitat, through many generations. It is an investigation of the interweaving of land and life that might guide us to a more symbiotic future.” 
Janzen, H. Henry. The Soil Remembers. — In: Soil Science Society of America Journal, October 20, 2016, p.1430.

Memories of the Soil

We are nature. Our bodies are nature.

WE ARE NATURE is a series of three photographs which represent the human-nature relationship.
We have forgotten that we are part of this nature and we have lost touch with nature. We have turned nature into our enemy and permanently and consciously we are destroying it.
Have we forgotten who we are? Have we forgotten where we come from? Have we forgotten what we are a part of? Or blinded by our greatness and super-abilities, we want to subdue everything to ourselves? Or do we still remember that we are part of nature?
We are nature. Our bodies are nature.

We Are Nature

in-between is a cycle of twelve 50x50 cm mixed media paintings on PVC board grouped in four triptychs. All of them were inspired by the Liminal project, recently launched by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós and described by them as a constantly evolving playlist which “will be built over linear time into a never-finished project of ceaseless invention”. Like the musical exploration of prolonged threshold phases of slowly but incessantly changing sound events in Sigur Rós’s Liminal, the in-between cycle offers a pictorial world – an imaginary space-time – where diverse transformations take place, where different threshold transitions and stages of liminality have been artistically explored. During this process, liminality itself is considered as a realm where questions are raised rather than one where answers are offered.
Each triptych of the cycle is a suggestion of movement, of shifting strata, of flowing torrents of energy, of transition from one unstable state or shape to another. These paintings are tangles of vivid colours and stylized forms on the liminal borderline between allusive representation and total abstraction. They could be recognised as a process of finding a definitive form, as consequent stages of metamorphoses, as phases of embryogenesis or even as zoomed-in transitions towards the inner structure of foetal tissue. They could also be interpreted poetically as depictions of memories of the embryonic development or as an attempt to form a new inner(most) world – a venture to re-examine values, to re-consider ideas in order to accomplish a new state of living with re-established system of knowledge and experience. We could also argue that these paintings are completely non-narrative displays of pure visual ideas, based on special symmetry, colouristic balance and compositional rhythm.
The foundation of existence is precisely the transition from one state, moment or spatial point to another. This process of threshold travelling is associated with a deep inner awareness, with the courage to look inside and to meet your genuine identity. Leaving the others, leaving the already known or leaving the usual is a turning point which makes you face the liminal silence. In this silence you can hear your fears, hopes, dreams and needs. Somewhere there you meet yourself. This is the point of no return where you can say goodbye to your old shell; the time to move forward to another form, level or state.


in-between

The cycle is an attempt to explore the extreme ascetism of artistic and representational means of expression. In all four artworks of the cycle I reject not only the figurative painting but also the usage of any (even most blurred abstract) forms and different colours. Instead, each painting relay on the monochromic “palette” of almost undistinguishable and even imperceptible nuances of just one “plane” colour in painting I and II, of the grey in painting III and of the black in painting IV. As a matter of fact, the impression of nuances is a kind of illusion – a visual effect, achieved through special deformation of the thick but pliable board. The deformation itself is caused by heating and burning. The result could be described as an alien landscape of uninhabited and deserted waste – a non-existing and contradictory three-dimensional (instead of two-dimensional) topographic map. But metaphorically speaking, this landscape is a symbolization of the inner world of an alienated person – a person, alienated far away from the self-consciousness; a person in meditative state after suppressing all kinds of emotional or existential burning, in exploration of the Buddhistic Emptiness – the so called Śūnyatā with all its complexity, multiple meanings and insusceptibility to definition or any rationalisation, but sometimes comprehendible through oxymoron sentences. Instead of wise sentences, this cycle offers four wordless and quite oxymoron three-dimensional topographic representations of Emptiness.

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Nikolay Vlahov

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