Heimaey sits on living geology. Eldfell’s 1973 eruption didn’t end so much as pause. The lava fields remain, the buried houses remain, and the island’s expanded coastline that was formed from that eruption now shelters the fishing boats better than before. That new land became a harbor that assisted the fishing industry. The catastrophe created the conditions for survival.

The photographs follow a material that keeps reappearing: black netting, draped over stored fishing gear, over excavated foundations, and over the managed lava fields at the edge of town. It may be literally the same material as things get repurposed. The fishing nets echo the memorial netting. It covers objects to store them, to preserve them, to assist in the archeological dig, to hold them in suspension between one use and the next.

There’s a sense of layered nows, of the slowandrapid geological mutations, of the instinct to preserve and uncover the time in the archeological dig.