Faultlines
2015 - 2018
Photographic rubbings (hand-embossed silver gelatin photograms on sepia and selenium toned fiber paper)
Faultlines marks the beginning of McKenna’s “photographic rubbing” technique. She innovated this process in 2015 during a year-long studio residency at Headland’s Center for the Arts (a decommissioned military base on the Northern California coastline) where she used the landscape and crumbling military architecture as her first subject for this laborious, tactile method. Working on the darkest nights of each month, she hand-embossed large sheets of photo paper into cracks in rock and concrete and then returned to the darkroom to cast grazing light across the resulting textures before developing them. This process fixes an image of the shadows cast by the subtle relief that the paper holds - an image made by touch and pressure rather than sight. This method intentionally mis-uses the medium and subverts photography’s privileging of the eye and optics. These textured, photographic rubbings are then collaged together to construct meandering faultiness; fictional compositions composed of detailed surface evidence.