Strata of Pilbara
Photographs and Stratagrams

Daniel Blochwitz

If we cannot see certain things directly or can observe processes directly because they take place over very long periods of time or in inaccessible places, but our curiosity is fascinated by them and wants to make them visible, then the visual imagination of the artist is required. The desire to know and the desire to art unite here to create artistic interpretations of scientific questions. Only the artist is in the privileged position of being able to make claims without scientific proof and to be able to fill white areas in an imaginative way. On the one hand, as an artist who works with the medium of photography, a very precise instrument is available to make things visible. But it also has its limitations. This is where Bernd start with strategies that expand photography and artistic form finding.


PHOTOGRAPHS
His new project Strata of Pilbara is also about scientific investigations and their artistic interpretations in the context of the relativity of our concept and understanding of time. The previous and underlying groups of works on ancient tree wood or thousand-year-old glacier ice, for example, provided the basis for this work.
This time the focus of Nicolaisen’s photographs is on the earth’s crust and deals with the surfaces and structures of some of the oldest rock formations on our planet. As in the previous works, Bernd makes use of the shallow incident light of the morning and evening sun, and can work out surface differences as small as millimeters. Light and shadow replace our precise sense of touch and enable rock structures to be experienced in photography. Combined with the illustration of found rock and mineral colors, a very precise picture of the materiality of the rocks is created.
It is exciting that geological time periods are juxtaposed with photographic time spans and that together they create image abstractions of naturally created and shaped rocks that are scientifically explainable and can be assigned accordingly.


STRATAGRAMS
The works in the second series, the Stratagrams, move even further in the direction of artistic interpretation of the geological traces found on site. They depart from the straight photographic image and instead are intended to visualize what normally exists and takes place in the depth of the earth, all those possible colors, forms, textures, and proces-ses.

The "Stratagram" combines aspects of painting and photography. BN: „I am interested in the relationships between the elements and how the interaction of adhesion and cohesion generates an image.“ The materials and chemicals used react most differently with one another. Nicolaisen can deliberately direct and subjectively influence their visual effect - but in a process like manner and thus not as immediate as in painting and without any representational intention. The resulting intricate, naturallooking forms and textures owe their gestalt to random processes and reactions.
This results in extreme, highly detailed densities and definitions in a kind of "visual journey", which at first glance bears a resemblance to aerial photographs. The image is created through physical and chemical processes, which are staged analogously on glass plates and then digitized. The stratagram, the "chemical image", consists of water, oxides, methanol, copper, gold and silver pigments, local soils and powders from the boreholes at the North Pole Dome in Pilbara. These natural elements create the actual three-dimensional effect of the picture and a fascinating world outside my own experience. The subconscious penetrates this image upon viewing, thus opening spaces for fantasy and setting our imagination free.

Information on the Strata of Pilbara Project
The groundwork that Martin Van Kranendonk and Kathleen Campbell have drawn from the work and insights gained from the North Pole Dome geoscientific program in Pilbara, Western Australia, provides the scientific community with evidence and at the same time stimulates human imagination.

To see more about the project watch the documentary Strata of Pilbara with Daniel Blochwitz and Adam Lowe. A film by Cédric Marville.