Maya Rochat: A Rock Is a River

Book excerpt: A Rock is a River, a new book by Swiss artist Maya Rochat, binds the alchemy of photography with the physicality of painting. Rochat creates organic patterns, chromatic alterations and visual ruptures that generate a slow, ongoing process of images mutating, reflecting a world in permanent flux. In the long tradition of artists' books as artworks in their own right, Rochat understands the space of a publication as site-specific, and has conceived a series of works for the form of the publication, taking into account the possibilities of layout and printing experimentation. Drawing from the past two years of her photographic production, she revisits and interweaves images in various scales and rhythms to create an ongoing, unfolding collage in book form. The name derives from the collection of raw material Rochat gathered to create the book. Much of it was shot in Valle Verzasca, in the Locarno district of her native Switzerland, as well as within other landscapes she has a direct connection to such as Peru, where her father lives. Inspired by the altering states of matter transforming in the natural world - the sculpting forces of continually moving water, rocks transformed by rivers, solids turning to liquids and back again - Rochat works layers of transformation into each her own works, in her own process of sedimentation.