These images were photographed in August 2013 in the Jewish cemetery of the village of Bolechow in the Ukraine. Among the upright and blackening gravestones, it was surprising to discover overturned stones with a thick adjacent layer of recently peeled-off detritus of earth clumped with roots and seeds, together with an imprint of symbols and Hebrew letters, each neighboring clump of earth forming a perfect negative of the original gravestone. The impression was of open books offering a close and dual encounter between enduring stone and crumbling earth, between the gravestones’ terminal representation of death and the contrasting fruition of life awakening in the seeds within the earth clods; between the precisely written inscriptions and their earthy negatives, transcendence as opposed to temporality, resonant of a moment of birth and the afterbirth’s shedding of the placenta.

These open-book impressions derive from a journey attempting to peel off substance from absence, and they are reminiscent of the plaster casts that were formed from the spaces discovered within the archeological digs at Pompeii, a process that exposed human figures bent in embryo positions, confronting the volcanic eruption of almost two-thousand years ago, where too death connected with the beginning of life and time collapsed within a moment.