Bodies Connected by Earth - Anna Rotty
Bodies Connected by Earth
Anna Rotty
This work was shared as a part of the Bodies Connected by Earth Practice Group Circle Back on February 25, 2026.
Things bound, in space and in long drawn out time, so long that we can hardly understand. Rock, sediment, earth, aridification of small plots of property in my neighborhood. Recording the glimpses of things, things that I imagine will always look the same on short walks built around small moments of available time. Availability, promise of opportunity, future, forward, it seems like those things happen in community, in spaces like this where we dedicate time sacredly to perpetually caring for our practice and each other. Being in this group was such a gift. A way to slow down and listen to the earth and to each other for a carved out moment each week. I spent the 6 weeks sketching. Making photographs and beginning to look in a new way at the core of one branch of my practice, looking at the slowness, the things fixed in my commute. I noticed looking. Looking at place and each other, me describing looking to students and hoping that they can be afforded the time to look with wonder.
Dafna showed us a photo of a gravestone with a plaque that said perpetual care, meaning someone had arranged for this grave to be forever groomed and looked after. I can’t believe that, but I love the idea, that forever this tiny plot will be acknowledged and protected. My friend came by for a studio visit and we talked slowness and how time can get stuck and clogged. That time requires movement. They told me that when entropy is low we have an ordered system and when entropy is high, change is high, movement is flowing, chaos erupts. In the desert I’m reminded of a different time scale. Things appear to move slow most of the time, but when you look close you can see small signs of activity and even the fixed dead trees look like they are screaming into the night, with no soft leaves to soften their cackling, signaling the birds to stir up the sky, the wind whisks the cottonwood leaves and seeds into a cyclone, doing their best to perpetually care for the next season. Moving things along even in the slow period.
With these sketches I feel rest, something Frances invites us to partake in seriously each week. Something I have put out of practice as much as I did when I lived within the extreme cycles of Northeast, but I am learning to incorporate as I get older, and more tired, and as I realize that perpetual care takes consistent, serious rest.
Anna Rotty lives on Tiwa Pueblo land known as Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2024 she received her MFA in photography, and currently teaches at, the University of New Mexico. Rotty’s work has been published by Southwest Contemporary Magazine and Lenscratch, and she’s published two books with National Monument Press. Last year Rotty was a recipient of the Silver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship honorable mention. She has recently exhibited at Chung 24 Gallery in San Francisco, San Francisco Camerawork as part of FORECAST, Princeton University, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and Texas Tech University. She was a 2024 fellow resident at MASS MoCA and is currently exhibiting at the Vladem Contemporary New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.
Instagram: @annarotty
Website:www.annarotty.com
