Courtesy of the artist; Commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art with support from The Snyderman Fund for Art Acquisition
Eric William Carroll is an Asheville-based artist. He uses photography to explore science and nature. Natural Time is made up of 84 photograms. Photograms are photographic images made without a camera by placing objects in front of light-sensitive paper and exposing it to light. Carroll installed each panel in a grove of river birches in the Museum Park. The river birch is a tree he favors because it reminds him of his hometown in Minnesota. Over several days, he exposed the panels to sunlight and the trees’ shadows, from 8 to 10 am and 4 to 6 pm, with the Park’s smokestack acting as a sundial.
Natural Time documents the forms of river birches and their changing environment. Hazy skies from Canadian wildfires and extreme summer heat affected the exposures. Through this camera-less process, Carroll captures a landscape shaped by time and uncertainty
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