Approx. 60" high x 47” wide
Four 30 x 22 inch cyanotype prints
Meg Madison uses the cyanotype process to document human connection to the land. Madison was born and raised in New York City and studied film at San Francisco State. She began making photographs that explored memory, ritual, and the ecological consequences of objects as they transition from desired items to waste. This led to work about measuring and mapping land, and the cyanotypes. megmadison.com, @madisonmeg
The Ground They Stand On are prints of the Joshua tree, Yucca brevifollia, as it stands on former Mohiatniyum Serrano land, with its constant companion, the desert wind. The prints are made using the cyanotype printing process. Sheets of paper are hand coated with light sensitive iron ore solution, (potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate), and allowed to dry in a dark place. In the sunlight the following day, the coated paper is placed beside the living plant, so its shadow blocks the sunlight exposing the paper, and the wind moves, and time passes. The paper is then developed in local well water where the parts exposed to the ultraviolet sunlight turn brilliant blue and the remaining white area is the shadow or silhouette of the Joshua tree.
Each print is a unique photogram, a shadow of a part of the tree. Individual prints, made of different trees, at different times, with different weather, on different kinds of paper are combined to make one Joshua tree—consisting of the different moments in its life, the segments our eyes see that our brain connects for us, the moments that occur at different times but are connected.
Humwichawa is the name for the Joshua tree in Cahuilla, an Uto-Aztecan language neighbor of the disappearing Serrano language. This work is made as a tribute to Humwichawa and to the Serrano and Cahuilla peoples past and present.