C A R R I A G E
A N E X C E R P T
Along the rotting rails lies a line of wood. It ends where the track begins. And it’s not right.
“Tree’s don’t queue,” says our guide and darts into the underbrush, following what she claims was once a road. But I see no sign of infrastructure. We left any sense of direction long ago. Here the air is colder, the sun punches through the treeline and litters the earth like shrapnel.
The moss gives way to rock and shield. Not the porous karst of limestone I have grown accustomed to; this is granite. This land is solid and it is hurt.
Cut into the land like flesh, these wounds run deep and they scar.
We track these cuts, unaware and searching. I imagine it often begins like this. Curiosity and ignorance.
I imagine it’s a progress, a slow decline: degradation in half lives.
“Tree’s don’t queue,” says our guide and darts into the underbrush, following what she claims was once a road. But I see no sign of infrastructure. We left any sense of direction long ago. Here the air is colder, the sun punches through the treeline and litters the earth like shrapnel.
The moss gives way to rock and shield. Not the porous karst of limestone I have grown accustomed to; this is granite. This land is solid and it is hurt.
Cut into the land like flesh, these wounds run deep and they scar.
We track these cuts, unaware and searching. I imagine it often begins like this. Curiosity and ignorance.
I imagine it’s a progress, a slow decline: degradation in half lives.
A B O U T
Carriage explores a train wreck in the midst of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. Created in conjunction with East London Printmakers and The Florence Trust, this book accompanies a collection of large scale screenprints on birch wood, which are painted and lastly engraved as woodcuts. The work explores the site as a cartographic palimpsest of traces, that coalesce to form a cartographic map of memory and its absence. The work invites us to experience a site from scales and timeframes beyond our present moment: from the perspective not of years, but generations, and civilisations not our own. Chan's works explore the correlation between architecture and sculptural landscapes of derelict and disused spaces. I seek sites where the intersection between function and intention have fallen into decline and disrepair, where untold histories recount themselves, in all their brevity, satire, beauty, and collapse.
Edition of 100, 122 pages. Risograph,, Printed in London.
ISBN 978-0-9938405-6-2
2018
ISBN 978-0-9938405-6-2
2018
Photography courtesy of Oliver Holms 2018.
