Ochre
Ochre is a multivalent material combining iron with oxygen in an endless number of geological and biological forms. Ochre is an iron-oxide mineral pigment. Since Iron is the fourth most common element on the Earth’s surface, iron-oxides are abundant across the globe. Our planet was born of stellar iron dust accumulating into mass from ancient supernovae. This Iron exists today in our earth, in our water, and in our bodies. Ochre is a threshold in arbitrary distinctions between life and nonlife. Ochres occur in plural forms, from dense rock to the finest clay dust, as solid or in solution.
Ochre is always in a state of becoming—becoming color, becoming blood. Ancient, stellar death becoming current, terrestrial life; geological memory becoming future technology. Humans have evolved with Ochre: a polyphonic being threading iron though our bodies, our lands, our cultures, and our knowledge.
By grinding in the mortar and pestle, erosion is quickened and bodies are reduced to a pigment extension of iron. When pigment is swatched—that is, combined with binder and applied to a substrate—its agency in hue is extended. These extensions offer additional dimensions to understand our worlds beyond cartesian limits, from the birth and death of ancient stars to the matter of earth below our feet.
FSGS palettes become signifiers of place, each dependent on a singular moment in time and site. In order to transcend the aesthetic fetishization of so-called pristine or wild nature, FSGS resists imposing redundant representational form on the colors found in each site. The critical mapping of color becomes a drawing of nonhuman agency. In this practice, humans are an extension of nature, not separate observers or translators of nature.
Field Studio Geontological Survey
FSGS is a bifurcation of practice established by the early land surveys of the mid-19th Century. Those proto-surveys were eventually formalized as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) by act of the United States Congress in 1879. Since then, the USGS has mediated our understanding—and relations to—the nonhuman as raw material or natural resource to be extracted. This constructs dualisms in which humans survey/observe, catalog, map, and publish abstract values of terrestrial beings enclosing the agency of the more-than-human.
FSGS is an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, feminist practice—an alternative mapping of place in geological time through matter(s) of care. This practice forms relations with geological terrestrial beings instead of positioning them as anonymous resource. It expands the world making capacity of the survey and map, atlas and archive.
Grinding minerals is not a sustainable practice. It flattens the work of millions of years of geological process as pigment is extended from the Ochre body. FSGS engages the incommensurability that emerges from an assemblage practice that attempts to diverge from extraction logics. Ochre bodies are only sampled from sites of prior disruption—road cuts, tailings piles, and washes where materials are otherwise overturning in flux.
Modes of Practice
1. Field Operations—in which FSGS collaborators assemble Ochres from sites identified for their entanglements in extraction histories and practices.
2. Community Operations—are gatherings to celebrate and educate. These operations invite the public to participate with Ochre during Ochre Office Hours, participatory demonstrations, and field trips.
3. Studio Operations—where ancient iron sea bed meets modern steel press bed, bodies are extended to pigment and swatch dimensions and FSGS products are manufactured and published.