Katherine Filice “Buried Time is a multi-year, multi-site art project in which raw canvas is buried directly in the earth across ecologically distinct California landscapes, left for a minimum of one year, and then excavated. What returns is not blank. Soil leaves mineral stains, roots press into the weave, moisture and seasonal change shift the surface. In many cases the canvas carries an image, tree forms, horizons, atmospheric depth, largely shaped by the conditions of that place and that year.. The premise is simple and, I think, radical. The canvas is not a surface I mark. It is a surface I prepare, place, and return to, shaped as much by landscape, time, and biological process as by anything I bring afterward. The land is not a subject I paint. It is a collaborator, a co-author, a painter in its own right. “

Site Two | Red Dot Ranch, Pescadero California:
“Rooted Time”

Red Dot Ranch was chosen as Site Two because the land itself is already engaged in a process of regeneration. Through active stewardship, areas of the property are being intentionally disturbed and restored to support the health of the larger ecosystem. Rather than introduce a new disturbance for Buried Time, the canvases will enter the ground in an area already connected to that work.

Four large, raw canvases will be prepared using materials from the ranch, including earth, biochar and plant matter, before being folded, twisted and buried for at least one full year. One will also carry marks made by people gathered at the site, placing a human record of that moment into the ground alongside my own.

Rooted Time begins with intentional marks made at a particular moment and place, then gives those marks over to a living landscape. What ultimately returns from the ground will be determined by the collaboration that happens there.

With deep gratitude to Karen and Mark Curtiss for their tremendous generosity and support.