Current Project

Geological Landscape as Ritual Instrument

Status
Current research

Description

This project investigates how geological processes created the physical environments that later became places of ritual, mythology, and sacred practice.

Rather than treating landscape as the setting for ritual, this research asks whether landscape itself functioned as an active participant by directing movement, shaping sensory experience, and constraining where ritual occurred.

Current focus includes:

• Scandinavia

• Driftless Area (Wisconsin)

• Mojave Desert

• Southern Louisiana

Expected outputs:

• Conference presentation

• Essays

• Field observations

• Artwork

Research Questions

This is probably the most important section.

Not conclusions.

Questions.

For example:

Geological Time

How do millions of years of geological processes influence religious imagination?

Sacred Geography

Why do caves, springs, cliffs, mountains, rivers, and coastlines repeatedly emerge as ritual sites across cultures?

Deep Time

How does understanding geological time alter experiences traditionally described as sacred?

Landscape Perception

Can geological knowledge change the phenomenological experience of place?

Ritual Technology

Can landscapes themselves be understood as technologies that shape human perception?

Notice how none of these require you to "prove" anything.

They simply tell readers where your curiosity lives.

Current Field Sites

Instead of listing trips, I'd literally make a map.

Then underneath:

Mojave Desert

Field observations concerning aridity, solar exposure, volcanic landscapes, and solitude.

Driftless Area

Karst systems, Paleozoic bedrock, glacial absence, river incision.

Southern Louisiana

Delta formation, sediment transport, coastal change.

Future

Scandinavia

Methods

This is the section I almost never see artists write—and I think you absolutely should.

It gives people confidence in how you work.

For example:

Research combines

• geological literature

• archaeology

• comparative mythology

• field observation

• phenomenology

• photography

• drawing

• artistic practice

• historical sources

That's essentially your methodology.

Current Reading

You don't even need annotations.

Just

Currently Reading

• Mircea Eliade

• Tim Ingold

• Yi-Fu Tuan

• Christopher Tilley

• Old Norse sources

• Geological Survey reports

As this grows it quietly communicates that this is an active scholarly practice.