Hazel Eckert: Never Destroyed, or Created

Author’s note: This text is punctuated by excerpts drawn from a reading list that Hazel Eckert shared with me to guide my understanding of her practice. Here, they function as impressions, ideas, and propositions that sit alongside Eckert’s work and my writing on it. Additional context for the sources is held in the endnotes.

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This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

– Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dark Pines Under Water¹

I’ve had this dream, recurring in variations, since I started taking photographs. I see something of overwhelming beauty, and I reach for my camera, only to realize that I don’t have it with me. Upon waking from these dreams, in a haze of awe and dread, I puzzle over what it means for my brain to develop these pictures. And what of this intense longing to capture? It seems at once so particular to image-making and also a powerful metaphor for all manner of desires and frustrations. 

These dreams come to mind when I think about Hazel Eckert’s work, which takes shape across a range of photo and print-based media, with images wavering on the edge of visibility, pushed, pulled, or found there. Eckert’s fascination with copies, glitches, artifacts, and degenerating information is a meditation on temporal and technical thresholds. Her practice is a very physical (sculptural and material) manifestation of the immaterial: the mental, emotional, and social spaces inside of us constructed around and through images. Studies have shown that each time you remember a past event, new neural connections are made that will change how you recall it next time. We remember our memories, which become copies of copies. This accumulation, where nothing is fixed among the flood of information, and any attempt to hold on mutates the very thing we try to grasp, finds form in Eckert’s work.

The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. […] The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. 

– Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”²

For the installation Slow Drift (2017), Eckert selected images from her archive, gathered over the years from magazines, newspapers, and the internet. Photocopied again and again, they gradually deteriorated into abstraction as information was lost along the way. These printouts were scanned, arranged in film-like timelines, printed on long pieces of sheer fabric, and hung from the ceiling like a cascading waterfall. What significance these images might have had before is uncertain; they are excised and reduced, slowed and broken down. Eckert asks us to pay attention to their subtleties, the forms that dissolve and what others emerge. In my attempt to do so, trying to slow my vision, I come up against its own tendency and training to move quickly, to scan, sort, and interpret any visual information presented as an image. An underlying buzz creeps in, the rumbling frequency of the never-ending flow of images travelling in the very air we breathe. The images in Slow Drift are vulnerable to environmental fluctuations such as light, temperature, or air. Their transparency challenges the eye’s relationship to the surface; it can’t be easily glided across or rested on. In contrast, in a piece titled [Moss] Generational Photocopies (2017), Eckert shows the process of cumulative degradation directly on paper. Two side-by-side topographical photos gradually fade from recognition as their photocopies are photocopied again and again. On the final sheets, the original images have morphed into gooey slicks of magenta toner; only the darkest shadows carry forward, with new clouds and smudges gathered along the way. I can look at these images forward or backward, or jump between the frames; as the pictures change, so do their resemblances, recalling plant life, grey matter, bodies of water, and magnified cells. In their film-strip sequencing, both Slow Drift and [Moss] Generational Photocopies emphasize the temporal aspect of images, their time-bound movements through both decay and proliferation—their lives.

But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality—for turning it into a shadow.

– Susan Sontag, On Photography³

In Soft Focus (2019), Eckert works with found rather than fabricated distortions. Screenshots of her iPhone capture images in the process of loading, generating atmospheric approximations of forms on their way into view. In day-to-day experience, such moments can be irritating, a pause in the scroll, drawing our attention to the speed at which our attention moves. She describes these as “time lags,” a “form of digital alchemy with the potential to reveal aspects of our internal landscape, evoking feelings of otherworldliness, impermanence, and dislocation in an environment that is increasingly shaped by technology.” Rather than a hindrance, Eckert sees these blurs as a shift back to the embodied present, moments with their own potential. Also printed on transparent fabric and suspended in a spatial array, the images can be looked at individually, in overlapping clusters, or as a whole. They remind me that screens are not just flat surfaces; they are also membranes and filters. The soft, airy forms—extracted and abstracted—read like delicate Rorschach tests. Where they came from, and what they were on their way to becoming, hold little significance compared to what they generate here and now.

Why is the sky blue?”—a fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

– Maggie Nelson, Bluets⁴

Eckert’s latest body of work brings the tools of her practice to bear on a personal experience of grief. In 2022, her mother passed away in an accident in rural Manitoba, while visiting the community where she was born and raised. Standing at the site, soon after this sudden loss, Eckert felt compelled to gather plants, grass, soil, and stones, “as if trying to hold onto pieces of her.” She brought them back to her studio, where she laid them on the scanning bed of a risograph printer. Some of the resulting compositions appear random and chaotic, others carefully arranged in elegiac wreaths and bouquets. They speak to the fragility of life, but also its continuance and replication—we ourselves, our bodies, are copies of copies. Through Eckert’s work, these physical fragments of place appear as their own index, as pieces that were witness, felt the same breezes, shared light and breath. As objects, they are mementos, stilled. As images, as copies, they multiply and echo. They don’t freeze time, nor do they only emphasize its passing. They seem to stretch it, along with space, to speak to that which transcends both—love.

So much of the language of photography, film and digital, is built around increase and decrease, enlargement and compression, gain and loss (lossy, lossless). But if images can be understood as a form of energy, they can never be destroyed, or created.

Dust = Dust

–-Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print⁵

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Rose Bouthillier is a contemporary art curator and writer based in Maberly, NL. In addition to her independent practice, she is the Artistic Director of Bonavista Biennale. The research for this text was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Hazel Eckert is a multidisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Ottawa, ON. She works across analog and digital technology to create prints, installations and artist books. Eckert owns and operates Nothing New Projects, an independent risograph studio that produces artist-led projects and contemporary print-based works.

1. Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Dark Pines Under Water,” The Shadow Maker (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972). The first line of this poem became the title for a series of Eckert’s sculptures, This land like a mirror turns you inward (2020), with images suspended on panes held in unfolding steel frames.
2. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal, no. 10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. Eckert: “I stumbled upon and read this during a residency in 2017 and it felt like she captured what I was trying to express with my work then and now. It feels like one of the more important/pivotal texts I’ve read in relation to conceptualizing my art practice. In some ways, this text felt like this century’s version of Sontag’s On Photography, like the natural evolution of Sontag’s train of thought.”
3. Susan Sontag, “The Image World,“ On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 180. Eckert: “There are a lot of dog-eared pages in my copy; a book I keep revisiting.”
4. Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009), 62. Eckert: “I’ve read this twice, before and after my mother’s death. I knew nothing about it except that it is a meditation on the colour blue, which was enough for me to buy it. The book is composed of fragments carefully arranged that form a loose narrative that feels somewhere in between poetry and prose. You can read it from front to back, or sometimes I pick it up and flip through the pages and read random passages. The fragmented form reflects the lived experience of things like love, loss and grief that Nelson explores in her writing.”
5. Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894 (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012), 161. “Dust = Dust” is drawn from the appendix “Print vs electrons” in which charts the equivalence of terms in “100 differences and similarities between paper and pixel,” i.e., paper weight = Download time, Fibres = Waves, smell of ink = sound of mouse clicks. “Dust” is the only equalizer.

This article is published in issue 42.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue