Surface History begins with satellite images of multilayered landscapes, where human systems meet—and often strain against—geologies formed over millennia. I search for places in which infrastructure, extraction, settlement and cultivation have inscribed themselves visibly into the Earth.

Printed in inkjet on clear self-adhesive vinyl film, the images are manipulated with sprays and floods of water. As I try to direct the wet pigment, it pools, drains, separates, desiccates and fissures elsewhere. The apparently authoritative satellite view breaks down, and I introduce another, unstable geography of my own.

This tension between control and contingency becomes a material echo of the existential drama and bodily vulnerability of life on a changing planet. The project develops an earlier body of water-distorted aerial photographs, The Ultimate Kindness of Water, shifting from images I took from an aircraft to landscapes produced through systems of remote sensing.

The resulting works are unexpected terrains in which governance, science, love and terror become entangled.