Elpitha Tsoutsounakis’s Unknown Prospect explores the material possibilities of ochre to showcase the beauty and agency of the Utah landscape and its nonhuman inhabitants.
TEMPLE MOUNTAIN, UT—Elpitha Tsoutsounakis is a geologist of sorts, though her approach to the study of rocks skews more toward alchemy than chemistry. In her hands, even an instrument as ugly and uncharmed as a Geiger counter could assume the mystical qualities of a divination rod.
We were at Temple Mountain, a former uranium mine in the San Rafael Swell in central Utah famed for producing ore so pure it was lusted after by Marie Curie. As we trudged through sandy piles of mining refuse, she held the radiation monitor to the air. The device chirped. The numbers on the screen increased. Then the batteries died.
“Is that a problem?” I asked. Tsoutsounakis shrugged. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I have a bad feeling about this spot.”
She did not need a Geiger counter to know that she was in the presence of something sinister, some miasma of radiation. She has spent the past four years of her artistic practice honing a tool much stronger than any scientific instrument—her intuition, especially as it pertains to rocks. And besides, we were not looking for uranium. We were looking for ochre.
“What is ochre?” I asked. “Iron oxide,” she said and then paused. Defining ochre is not a simple task for Tsoutsounakis. In fact, defining ochre is the very crux of her work as an artist.
She collects it, catalogs it, maps it, writes about it, paints with it. By engaging deeply with the material, she invokes larger questions about the history of the Earth, human evolution, color, extraction, and waste. Tsoutsounakis, who is an assistant professor of design at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, describes this process as “research through design” whereby “the material practice itself becomes the tool for knowledge production.”
As such, she had many answers to my question. Ochre is a rock. Ochre is a pigment. Ochre is stardust. Ochre is rust. Ochre is sentient. Ochre is a shade of orange. And blue. And green. And red. And purple. And brown. But more on that later.
For the purposes of our outing at Temple Mountain, ochre was a thing we could hold in our hands and describe in terms of geologic formations and GPS coordinates. We were surveying the area for her current project, Unknown Prospect, which subverts the notion that rocks and minerals are merely untapped riches, a narrative endorsed by the United States Geological Survey, which defines mineral resources solely in terms of their profitability.
To negate this narrative, Tsoutsounakis poses an alternative to the USGS—the Field Studio Geontological Survey. With ochre as its focus, the FSGS employs the tactics of the USGS—surveying, cataloging, mapping, and printing—to acknowledge that ochres, and all minerals, are far more than their financial potential, far more than rubble in an abandoned mine.
Four fledgling prospectors, myself included, accompanied Tsoutsounakis at Temple Mountain for the inaugural FSGS survey in late October 2022. After setting up camp, Tsoutsounakis explained the mission: to collect samples for a forthcoming ochre archive that celebrates the spectrum of colors that ochre pigments produce and tethers those colors to their place of origin.
The ochre samples will be made into pigments that will be used to paint color swatches and embellish maps. The archive will display images of the ochre samples in all forms—ochre, pigment, and color swatch—so as to connect the place to the raw material, the raw material to the pigment, the pigment to the color swatch, and the color swatch to all three.
“Thinking about the materiality of color is a resistance to the abstraction and the commodification of color,” Tsoutsounakis explained. “There’s this idea that a color is just a hex, or that a color doesn’t exist without Pantone’s approval. Capitalism has convinced us that it owns color. It produces color to sell to us. But if you do traditional color studies, you know that you can create an enormous range of colors, and those colors come from a real place.”
In HTML, for example, “ochre” is reduced to a hex triplet—#CC7722—and flattened into a single shade of orange-brown. In nature, however, ochres span shades of blue, green, purple, red, orange, and yellow, a range that reflects the ebbs and flows of ancient seas whose varying levels of oxygen colored iron on a spectrum of patina to rust.
The archive, which will be hosted by the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, will launch in January 2023. Her work will also be on display in two shows this spring—in Green River, Utah, and in Venice, Italy, in an exhibition called Time Space Existence during the Biennale of Architecture in May.
The archive is intended not only for artists, but anyone interested in deepening their connection to the landscape and its rocks. “Most people think about land in the [American] West in terms of its mineral value, or as waste and tailings piles,” she said. “I hope this is a useful tool for people to reorient themselves to these landscapes of extraction.”
We arrived at Temple Mountain a few hours before dusk. We would embark on the survey the following morning. In the meantime, Tsoutsounakis wanted to reacquaint herself with the mountain. She led us up one of the mine’s old service roads toward a ledge and a small hill of yellow sand and then stopped.
“I had a dream about this place,” she said. She laid a hand on the hill as if she were soothing a large animal. “The ochre slipped into my mortar, and then it slipped out.”
She remarked how different it looked since the last time she was there. Heavy rains had fallen in the interim, and the vibrant seam of red ochre that had once scarred the pile was gone.
“The ochre is hiding from me,” she concluded. She took a few samples and then stood abruptly to leave. “Let’s keep going,” she said. “This place scares me.” She was talking about the dream again, drawing parallels between the collapse of the hill and the collapse she feared in her personal life.
I considered omitting this and the Geiger counter anecdote for fear of discrediting Tsoutsounakis. She’s an academic in a society that worships proof—praising her intuition felt derogative. But dismissing her intuition seemed equally invalidating. During a phone call after the survey, we discussed the merits of foresight, a tool faster than any pattern-finding algorithm, a tool that never turns off.
“Everyone has these abilities, but it’s more about noticing the premonitions and the patterns,” she said. “Ochre is this beacon to come back to my intuition. I get completely swept up into it. Time is not passing when this happens. It just feels like endless wonder in a way that makes me understand intuition.”
For her, intuition is a matter of perspective, of understanding the specific only in relation to the whole. She imagines herself as a bird. If she soars too close to the ground, she will not see the snake approach. But if she looks to Earth from further up, she can, in a sense, see what is to come. Such is the case for her work with ochre—the material cannot be understood up close or in isolation. It must be viewed from far above, from past and future.
Back at camp, we ate dinner around a fire. Tsoutsounakis draped a large scarf around her shoulders. Shadows danced across her face. She told stories about her forefathers who emigrated to Utah from Crete to work in coal mines, a lineage she nods to in her work. She collects most of her ochre from old mines to honor this history, and moreover, to underscore a core tenet of Unknown Prospect: that byproducts and other things we call waste may still contain beauty and value.
In the morning, Tsoutsounakis doled out our surveying supplies: notebooks, pencils, mortars, pestles, plastic sampling bags, and spoons, for digging. We started up the mountain and gathered samples along the way. Our eyes became attuned to even the most subtle variations in color, to the differences between sage and celadon, verdigris and viridian, umber and terracotta.
But even as I try to honor the specificity of these shades, I cannot escape the language of iron oxides that give umber and terracotta their rusty reds, verdigris its patinated blue, and celadon its pale green of iron oxide ceramic glaze. Ochre is so fundamental to color it dominates even the words we use to describe its hues.
At one point while we were walking, Tsoutsounakis paused to admire a pocket of lavender ochre on an overhang above us. “Ochres are quite seductive,” she said. She did not elaborate.
I don’t have quite the same reverence for ochre as Tsoutsounakis, but I think I knew what she meant. She had spoken earlier of a phenomenon whereby some ochres that dazzle in the desert turn dull once relocated from their habitat. One could blame the artificial lights in her studio, perhaps, but Tsoutsounakis believes that some ochres hide themselves consciously.
“Ochres have agency,” she said. “They can be fickle. They’re shapeshifters.” They act in unpredictable ways that keep one coming back for more, like a slot machine or a mysterious lover. They conceal themselves, and in doing so, heighten their collector’s desire for the unattainable. In this sense, I understood what she meant by seductive. I understood the temptation of the unknown prospect.
Eventually, the ochre told us we had collected enough. “I don’t like to be greedy,” Tsoutsounakis said. Someone had a headache. Everyone had the taste of iron blood-metal in their mouths. “I think it’s from breathing this in,” a fellow prospector said, gesturing to the patch of unusually green sand she was kneeling in to collect a sample.
The weather was turning quickly. One massive and seamless cloud rolled over the sky. The wind howled a trespasser’s warning, and Tsoutsounakis understood. It was time to go, she said.