Dust Forest: Material Ecologies and Paper as Tertiary Memory in Contemporary Printmaking

Abstract

Dust Forest and Suite for an Imaginary Forest are contemporary printmaking works developed through an ongoing collaboration between artist Dr Emilia Telese and environmental scientist Dr Pavla Dagsson-Waldhauserová, investigating Iceland’s Arctic desert ecosystems and the circulation of high-latitude dust. Drawing on glacial erosion, historical deforestation and atmospheric transport, the works use Icelandic dust, mineral pigment and paper as active. Through monotype, engraving and collagraph processes, geological and climatic transformations are translated into material encounters grounded in time-based processes.

In this paper, Dr Emilia Telese situates these works within arts–science discourse as a parallel mode of inquiry rather than a didactic or illustrative response to scientific research. Central to the analysis is the role of paper as a site of externalised memory, aligned with Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) concept of tertiary memory, in which traces of human and geological time persist beyond the body through technical supports. Paper is examined historically, epistemically and materially, as a vulnerable, responsive surface shaped by the artist’s hands and environmental forces.

By foregrounding fragility, loss and material agency, Dust Forest proposes a reading of her printmaking practice as a medium for the ecological attunement of attention, where memory, matter and scientific knowledge converge through embodied processes.

Drawing on Ingold’s notion of materials as “gatherings of the world” (Ingold, 2013), Bennett’s theory of “vibrant matter” (Bennett, 2010), and Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), this practice-led research situates printmaking as and embodied memory, where print is an interface between scientific observation and poetic perception, translating environmental processes into tangible form.