At the beginning, the Earth was a large molten stone. Afterwards it cooled down, the magma crystallising into a crust and solid rocks. Even now there is a hot sphere of magma inside the Earth. The internal life of the Earth fluctuates quietly on its surface, a part of it is the skin on which we walk. The Earth’s crust is porous like the human skin: permeable, palpitating and breathing. Nothing is set for good: the inorganic and organic components of the Earth are in a constant process of solidifying and melting, in an endless becoming. The former living organisms are layered on the Earth with older ones at the bottom and newer ones on top, yet it is not always the case. Sometimes they have been disarranged, turned upside down or mined open.

The paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz uses geology to describe what comes after the humankind. By revealing the origin and development of rocks and the Earth’s crust, he offers a geological viewpoint of the future Earth. I use his texts about the development and layering of E/earth as a point of comparison and place them in the context of my artistic practice. Thinking and depicting in layers is my main method of creative research. Zalasiewicz calls Earth a machine of layers, which, unlike its neighbouring planets, and thanks to its hot core, is constantly reacting and in motion, growing and recreating new materials by taking them from a solid state to a liquid one and back again. In some cases, the layers will deposit on top of each other, but in others they are eroded by precipitation and winds. This description has many parallels with my printmaking process, both from creative and technological aspects.

Just like paleontologists can read the cavities inside the rocks left behind by once living bodies and the traces of their lives, we read the cavities, holes, erasures and torn out parts of artworks as elements of a complete image. The spaces between the letters form a silence which talks to us in the same manner as words and sentences do.

What could the Earth be like in a distant future? Compared to the present, it will probably be hotter and covered with more ocean blue. What relicts of our existence could the explores of the post-human Earth discover? The ruins of an old city, the rusted pieces of a car or the crumbs of plastic bags from a landfill? In his book The Earth After Us, Zalasiewicz speculates about the traces we would leave behind, reminding us after millions of years on the geological timescale. Strange chemical and isotopic signals in the rocks will testify to the global transformations that happened during the age of humans. These are urban strata and objects from our everyday life or maybe even cavities shaped like our bones that will be concealed in the stones of the future. I would imagine that we would leave behind a plethora of trash like plastics, concrete dust and the remains of clothing. The process of making art results in a lot of packaging scraps, lining paper, cleaning rags and lumps of adhesive tape. As a result of my desire to reuse more of the materials of my artistic process, I use tape and sewing thread to assemble an installation resembling a mountain.

Every once in a while, the Earth becomes old, crumples up and crinkles into striped mountains. Then again, it is rejuvenated, becoming smoother with landscapes levelling out through the ceaseless rhythm of winds and waters. Under the top, the most visible layer of Earth, which is like the skin of a living being, the layers of rock become the flesh and bones of the land. The iron red pigment of minerals is red like blood, gases and liquids circulating in the veins and arteries.

When thinking about the Earth, one’s way of thinking also becomes muddy and dark, striped like the geological strata which are not a uniform and monolithic mass, but a stratification of layers with different characteristics. One of the international pioneers of sculpture and painting, Robert Smithson has called the way of thinking that is muddy and imitates the processes of the surface of the Earth “abstract geology”: the spirit and the land are constantly eroding, the power of thoughts moves the abstract shores, ideas dissolving into the rocks of ignorance. Abstract geology, as the relation between thoughts and land, resonates also with my abstract forms of E/earth and rocks. The minerals are like a mass of conceptual and working processes which form into mountains and cavities, recalling and forgetting. This is the tension of the landscape, the unbearable contradiction between being and becoming.

What to call large works that consist of canvas, stretchers and frames, priming, printed images, watercolours, charcoal, acrylic paints, Indian ink and plexiglass? I don’t have a definite answer to that, but the works themselves direct me to use different techniques and materials. I reuse the paintings that I made some time ago: respecting the already existing shapes and surfaces, I carefully cover them with new traces. The existing surfaces point the way for the new lines. The existing work and their materials become the deciders, they are the quiet voice with whom I am having a wordless discussion.

A liminal state as being somewhere in-between or in a state of transition can also be attributed to printmaking. Such states or objects are hard to define because they have crossed the characteristic boundaries of a specific phenomenon but are not yet part of a clearly defined category. It is an uncomfortable state of expectation. The printmaker Tess Barnard defended her doctoral artistic research project on linocut as an artistic technique dividing the different processes into two categories: the skin (the surface) and cutting. Barnard puts into words what it means to print, emphasising the importance of the process as an endless becoming and a limitless potential. She also compares writing by hand with linoleum, as her method of documentation and research is writing letters. She compares the materials that she penetrates by cutting and deforming to skin which is a breathing living organism that is by nature liminal: like a threshold which will lead to another transformation if crossed.

The printed work is like the skin and the printing the embrace of two bodies tightly squeezed against each other. The matrix is pressed strongly against the surface on which the image is printed. Usually, the matrix itself is not exhibited. Only the trace remains, the shadow of the original shape. When it comes to animation, the objects on the glass tables act as matrices, while the photographic images are already the impressions of the original image. There is a serial quality to working with printmaking and animation: consecutive production being an inherent element of both media.

Stones, mountains, holes and landscapes are distorted into colourful shapes both on canvas and on paper but also in spatial installations and cutout animations. In contrast to the warm greyish texture of the canvases, I add shapes cut out of coloured plastic to the compositions. Plexiglass – the sleek, shiny and bright artificial material, i.e. the thermoplastic shatter-resistant polymethyl methacrylate – is laser cut using a previously drawn shape and engraved in freehand. Through this process, the scanned drawing becomes a vector file which can be sent through an application to the cutting machine where the blazing beam will burn the shallower lines onto the surface and will cut a precise shape out of the rigid material using the deeper lines. The pieces of plexiglass will become elongations and expansions of the freely flowing mountains and rocks. The painting moves out of the rectangle of the frame, on it, into the space surrounding the frame. The freehand drawing is converted into a vector format in a way that it acts like a matrix for the following material. Laser cutting is the expansion of printmaking in a shiny and cold new format.

The plastic, textiles and other (found) materials combined into metamorphic rocks deep in the lithosphere create new landscapes of thought. I discover poetically flowing mountains in the heap of blankets on the bed, on topographic maps or in the atlas of non-existent beings.