The Stratigraphic Archives

Michele Burgess’s ongoing series, “The Stratigraphic Archives” is an exploration of the processes, forms, and markings that reflect the patterns, gestures, and atmospheres of both quiet and cataclysmic events—natural and human made. She is interested in the relationship of these events to the human condition and the conditions of nature at its most fragile. Since 2005, she has been creating artist’s books that explore palimpsest, time and gesture, erasure and “repair.” Working in collaboration with other artists and poets, she seeks to combine human history and natural history, bringing these themes together in an essential way, working with ideas inspired by places such as churches and reliquaries, geological sites, art museums, personal memory, natural history museums, riverbeds and ocean floors, and library rare book rooms.