Einat Imber
When you’re waiting to see change happen, how long can you keep your eyes open without blinking? (I once learned from a detective novel that in order to resist the hallucinating effect of a truth serum, one can fixate on the marching second hand of a clock, as a way to hold on to the present moment.) 
It takes an hour and a half for the rising tide water to cover the span of an eighteen foot long strip of burlap, coated with a thin layer of photo-sensitive cyanotype emulsion. As the tide rises, the cloth disappears underwater, leaving less and less surface exposed to the sun. When the entire piece is almost gone I haul it out like a fisherman drawing their net from the depth of the ocean. The dripping burlap banner reveals a gradation from pale light to deep dark blue. It is a print which is at once both solar and lunar, a result of my collaboration with forces much larger than me—the sun, the moon, and the revolving earth.
The prints’ scale is determined by the process—they must have sufficient length to reveal a ‘blue scale’. Proportioned like a strip of paper in a scientific instrument that records change over time, one may think of a seismograph, a heart beat monitor, or even a grocery list. The imagery, accordingly, is not tied down to scale or proportion, but can stretch to infinity, like shadows at the end of the day or reflections reaching to the eye across bodies of water.
As we advance along our personal time-line we can be oblivious of change taking place: every day we recognize our reflection in the mirror as the same person we saw there yesterday. My series of tidal cyanotypes make visible the inevitable progression of time, registering the diurnal journey made by orbiting celestial bodies. Each print is a unique record of the time of day, the weather and the location it was made in. Reversing land-art’s relationship between artist and the landscape, here it is the environment leaving a mark on the work of art.
Ceding control to the ocean-tides, I wonder: What role does human agency play in determining any outcome? Are we mere subjects in the ebb and flow of our surroundings? Or can we change the course of our planet? the weather? history? our life?
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