HiResidency with Susan Eyre
Susan Eyre’s intention for HiResidency was to create a digital viewing option for her work Book of Reversals, 2026
Book of Reversals,2026, Sumaganshi, screen print, digital text on Japanese paper, 24.5 x 32.5 x 1.5 cm
Magnetic patterns preserved on the ocean floor hold a record of past activity over hundreds of millions of years but cannot predict future reversals.
The Book of Reversals offers a poetic overview of the formation of planet Earth and its turbulent fluid core, that generates an unpredictable but protective magnetic field prone to sudden changes in polarity.
The readings from magnetometers stationed around the British Isles, record variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, and are screen printed in vertical stripes on either side of the book’s spine, to emulate the geological phenomena of magnetic stripes found on the ocean floor.
Magnetic stripes are symmetrical bands found at mid-ocean ridges, created as magma rises, cools, and forms new oceanic crust whose magnetic minerals align with Earth’s prevailing field.
Hot buoyant material rises at mid-ocean ridges and cooler, denser rock sinks back into the mantle at subduction zones. Along convergent boundaries, the heavier oceanic plate is forced beneath another plate, forming trenches, generating earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and mountain belts. Through volcanism, weathering, and the recycling of carbon dioxide and minerals, plate tectonics regulates climate, nourishes the oceans, creates diverse habitats, and shapes the environmental pressures that drive evolution, making it essential to the long-term habitability of our planet.
The book’s text evokes the complex dynamics of the planetary body Earth, its geological history of reversals, periods of weakened magnetic field, the ceaseless interactions between the inner core, the outer core, the mantle and the crust and how its secrets may be discovered. We have to rely on remote sensing methods of investigation to discover what is deep below our feet, as humans have only drilled less than 0.2% to the Earth’s core. Cutting open the Earth can only reveal the epidermis, it is only through the shock waves of trauma that we can begin to understand what goes on inside. Seismic waves generated by earthquakes can infer the composition of Earth’s hidden interior, revealing through their speed, refraction, and shadow zones the boundaries between solid and liquid layers.
