Hormuz
Arabian Plate margin
Relief of the Strait of Hormuz, sculpted in maple and held within translucent black resin. The wood traces the drowned valleys of the Musandam Peninsula and the salt islands standing in the passage. Resin carries the water between them, from the shallow basin inside the strait to the deeper Gulf of Oman beyond it.
Shaping of Place
The strait sits where the Arabian plate is driving north into Eurasia. That collision raised the Zagros mountains along the far shore and continues to close the distance between the two landmasses.
The islands standing in the passage are salt. Ancient evaporite, buried under kilometers of younger rock and lighter than the load above it, rises through that rock in domes. Some of those domes have reached the surface and become islands, and the salt beneath them is still moving upward.
On the southern side the Musandam Peninsula is bending downward as the plate flexes beneath the collision. Its river valleys have been flooded nearly to the ridgelines, leaving a coast of steep inlets cut by water and now filled by it.
Inside the strait the water is shallow enough that the basin stood dry at the height of the last glaciation, drained by a river system that is now beneath it. The strait is the sill between that shallow ground and the deeper water outside.
Hormuz relief, full composition.
Installed relief, angled view.
Detail of the Zagros Mountains.
Detail of Oman's Al-Batinah Coast.
Three forces meet in this water. The Arabian plate is closing on Eurasia, salt is rising through kilometers of rock to stand as islands, and the land on the southern side is bending down until its valleys fill. Each moves at its own rate, and none of them has arrived anywhere.
The round format follows from that. Corners are a convention the ground never had, and straight edges read as bounds. A circle admits that it is a crop, an aperture on something continuing past it in every direction, closer to a core sample than to a frame.
The resin is dark enough that depth stops being readable partway down. What is visible sits near the surface. The rest has to be understood rather than seen.
Artist's Note
Studio work. Inquire about available work.