ELPITHA TSOUTSOUNAKIS / Geontological Survey of Fossil Grains

May 22 – September 20, 2024

Geontological Survey of Fossil Grains is an aggregate of three regional assemblies: archival materials, collective histories, and local geologies. The installation includes two maps that navigate the logic of worldmaking through Ochre practice, a bulletin of research that informs the works, and seven paper banners soaked in Ochre pigment each containing a “fossil of grain”. 

Header image: Fossil Bodies 004, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis

The exhibit is the next installation of the Field Studio Geontological Survey (FSGS), a design research collective thinking with Ochre through field, community, and studio operations. The installation is a culmination of FSGS field work in Ephraim surveying local Ochres, and archival research in the Utah Pioneer Costume Research Project. This work explores the history of rural women’s mutual aid organizations and maps them through potentials in the space between stone and grain.

If the fossil is the rock’s memory of the shape of the body that once was; the photograph is the archive’s memory of the shape of the body that once was. Traces of color–the golden dust of the quarry to the pale glow of grain–map alternative routes in past/futures.

About the Artist

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis is a Cretan American designer, printer, and educator based in Salt Lake City. She is a founding faculty and assistant professor in the Division of Multi-disciplinary Design at the University of Utah where she teaches visual strategy, research methods, and design studio. She completed a BS in architecture at the University of Utah and a Master’s in architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Her creative practice with Ochre engages design ethics and materiality through feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist relations to more-than-human worlds. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Southwest Contemporary and she was named a 2023 Design Arts Fellow by the Utah State Division of Arts and Museums. unknownprospect.org