studio

Maisie aims to examine traces of past ecologies in our landscapes, by delving deep into the earth and looking up into the sky.

Maisie’s intention is to uncover geological narratives, histories and ghosts of our past, as a way of examining our future. A brittle but biting adventure into our environment and the many messages embedded within it.

Where sky touches earth

Standing in the vast, dry Atacama desert, the sun is setting and streaks of pink bleed from the sky and blend into the ground beneath.

Soon the velvet black of night will envelop the southern hemisphere and tiny balls of light will sparkle. Sprinkling over the land.

This moment, an intersection between sky and earth, where boundaries blur and collide, is a combination of past, present and future time.

Traces of histories and narratives once lived are embedded in the stacks of layered earth beneath our feet. While the boundless space of sky sprawled above our heads stretches onwards.

Nostalgia for the light draws comparison between our navigation of the cosmos and unraveling of the past. From a country whose traumatic history had attempted to be erased, the director Patricio Guzmán, follows individuals who comb through layers of desert land to uncover fragments of the past.

The film explores how astronomy, geology and science can be used as a way of looking into the past. By navigating our exploration through the stars, we might better understand and examine the stories of our past.

Podcast
Reshaping a Siloed Science

The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

Robin Wall Kimmerer in Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

‘Our era of human destruction has trained out eyes only on the immediate promises of power and profits. This refusal of the past, and even the present, will condemn us to continue fouling our own nests. How can we get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly? We call this return to multiple pasts, human and non human, ‘ghosts.’ Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life.’

‘Anthropogenic landscapes are also haunted by imagined futures. We are willing to turn things into rubble, destroy atmospheres, sell out companion species in exchange for dreamworlds of progress.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

‘Salty scabs and where to pick them.’ This piece was made during a residency in the Atacama desert last year. Made from clay collected from the desert, with carvings and impressions from salty flakes of earth pressed into the surface. Referring, in a sense, to the earth as a continuously picked scab. A wound. A series of scars mapping tales of past lives, that heal, open and re-heal again. A crust to break and dig deep underneath, unearthing gooey matter, mixing it with our enveloping atmosphere.

Maisie Maris
2019, Atacama (Chile)

"we are all stardust," says a friend of mine. He understates the case. In fact, everything is stardust"

How does the stardust get here? "The interstellar medium is full of dust," .... "It's what makes the dark line across the centre on the Milky Way."

There are countless megatons of unknown dirt out there.

Earth, has two primary products: soil and atmosphere.'

'From this point of view, life on earth is a kind of machine for making soils and atmospheres. Volcanoes disgorge oxygen-poor, virgin mineral materials from deep inside the crust. Rising into the stratosphere, they pick up oxygen atoms and fall with them to Earth."

'Only here on Earth does stardust engage in this extraordinary array of self-organising behaviours. Only here in Earth does it perform the ceremony of continually creating an atmosphere.'

This is all from Dirt, the ecstatic skin of the earth"