Ochres from the Middle Earth

2023

research on Devonian ochres (Vidzeme, Latvia)

The particles of ochre, carried by wind, water, and air, are witnesses of millennia of erosion. The microcosm emerges through attention to detail, where the conception of linear time dissolves. Paul Prudence observes, "To get to the miniature worlds, we must first go beneath the surface of the rocks. When our imagination descends into these tiny images, we are freed from the conventions of ordinary space-time” (Prudence, 2022). Billions of tiny universes descend in rainstorms, settling in deserted rivers, shaping continents, and weaving new stories of Earth.

The landscape thickens; the act of experience goes beyond the context or the ability to recognise the exact location on the chronostratigraphic scale - to determine the age of one rock or another. Devonian ochres, 400 million years old, recount an era when the Baltics submerged as the sediments settled in the shallow seas covering northern Latvia. Does this knowledge help to mark points in the perspective of deep time, where the human time scale is non-existent? Clay goes from being an unnameable, shapeless mass to a particle which becomes the narrator telling a story about the age of the Earth.