Title: What Lies Beneath
Artist Statement
I took this photograph in a landscaped courtyard in Loreto, where volcanic rock had been arranged around the base of a cactus. The large red stone in the foreground drew my attention first. Its surface was rough and pitted, marked with white mineral deposits that traced the contours of its form like veins beneath skin. It rested on a bed of dark grey and black stones, smooth and rounded, clearly gathered and placed by human hands. Behind it, the green ridges of the cactus rose toward a doorway just beyond my view.
This is one of the photographs I have kept in colour. The red of the volcanic rock carries meaning that greyscale would flatten. The mineral white, the muted rose, the dark charcoal of the surrounding stones, these colours speak to origin and transformation. Volcanic rock remembers heat. It holds the shape of pressure and release, of matter that was once liquid and is now solid, porous, still.
I am drawn to stones that have been moved. Gathered from one place and set down in another, arranged to create order or beauty or simply to mark a boundary. These stones arrived here with intention. Someone chose them, carried them, positioned them around the cactus with intention. The red stone was placed to be seen. It holds its position like a body that knows it belongs, even if belonging required relocation.
In my scholarly and personal life, I think often about placement. Who decides where things go. Who arranges the landscape and for whom. The courtyard is designed, curated, maintained. The stones perform their role in a composition meant to welcome or impress. Yet the red rock carries its own history, its own memory of fire and cooling, its own slow accumulation of mineral and dust. It participates in the design without being reducible to it.
This image holds the tension between the natural and the arranged, between what the land offers and what human hands choose to do with it. The stone is both decoration and witness. It holds its ground amid the grey, asking nothing, offering only its texture and colour and the quiet fact of its presence.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026