10 inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Metallic. 82cm x 86cm.  2025

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The collision between the African and European tectonic plates, tens of millions of years ago, set in motion the formation of the Alps. Resultant tectonic stresses fractured solid rock creating cavities known as fissures or clefts. These voids soon became reservoirs for highly pressurised hydrothermal fluids which, heated to extreme temperatures, dissolved minerals from the surrounding rock.

 

Through the orogeny, the mountain building process that gradually uplifted the Alps, these deep rock formations were forced closer to the surface. Over millennia, the declining pressure and temperature allowed crystals such as quartz, fluorite, and amethyst to slowly grow within the fissures. As the Alps continued to rise skyward they carried these concealed treasures upward, leaving them hidden in the mountain walls. Today these Alpine fissures, locally known as “crystal furnaces”, preserve the record of this immense geological journey.

 

Genesis  explores the pathos inherent to locating such crystal furnaces, specifically in the Mont Blanc massif region of the French Alps, a breathtaking yet treacherous environment undergoing rapid change.

 

These exquisite jewel like spaces, that reference the origin’s of the Alps millions of years ago, are increasingly becoming accessible because of a warming planet that is literally destroying the mountains that house them. 

 

Rising temperatures are thawing millennia old permafrost, the invisible glue which once held the mountains together, dramatically altering the Alpine landscape and undermining its stability, forcing the mountains to give way. The resultant destructive forces are not only exposing furnaces that were once hidden within, but are also consuming them in the process. 

 

Those who scale high mountains in search of these furnaces and the crystals they hold place themselves in a precarious position, continually exposed to the perils of landslides, rockfalls, and avalanches. 

 

The journey these “crystal hunters”, must undertake is both symbolic and paradoxical.

To find the crystal furnaces which speak of the mountain’s birth, one must first pass through a hazardous landscape that speaks of the mountain’s end.

 

Within this context, there is an inherent sacredness to discovering a crystal furnace, both in finding it before any other human, and in witnessing it fleetingly before it is lost to natural forces. These exquisite spaces hold the memory of geological time, they reference the collision of two tectonic plates, the formation of fissures, crystals, and mountains. 

They speak of millennia. They speak of deep time.

 

The main body of work that comprises Genesis emerged from ten arduous trips into the Mont Blanc massif, undertaken in search of its unique and renowned crystals. The featured macro photographs capture the internal architecture of ten incredibly cramped crystal furnaces that Jacobus located near the Grandes Jorasses and the mountains surrounding the Talèfre Basin. These spaces were only a few centimetres wide yet sometimes metres deep, barely large enough for a human body to enter. As a result, the photographs had to be taken blindly. Unable to see through the viewfinder, Jacobus either had the camera pressed tightly against his body or extended it into spaces so narrow that only the camera itself could fit.

 

The resultant imagery reveals luminous traces of ornate beauty emerging from an enveloping darkness. A symbolic juxtaposition, embodying fragility and resilience, illumination and obscurity, creation and decay.