Earlier, I had walked through wild oregano, releasing its fragrance underfoot. That softer green savoriness had given way to tangy browns and yellows. The landscape was a thesaurus of onomatopoeia: stick, snag, scratch, trip, tear, poke, splinter, scrape. My walking was loud. Irreverent. Unfeminine. Attempting to be efficient. Someone had once accused me of walking like a cowboy – big stomping steps that get me places but sometimes leave my body sore. I was stomping like a grumpy cowboy.
Then I was standing on both feet. No plants. No sunlight. No momentum. There was nothing that had been there for all the preceding minutes, if not hours or days. I was underground.
*
Like everywhere else I have gone in the past decade, I had come to the small Cycladic island to look at its rocks and to think about how they have moved. I have travelled to look at quarries, bomb scars, caverns, asteroid craters, mine tunnels, and volcano calderas. I am often distracted by animal burrows, construction sites, graveyards and gravel pits. People chuckle when I say that my work is about piles of rocks and holes in the ground. But I am very serious about it. Everything comes out a hole – humans come from wombs and vaginas. Almost everything we buy comes from a mine or an oil rig. Carrots and potatoes are pulled from holes in the garden. Our universe itself was once a black hole that started this journey via the Big Bang. I can rewind anything back into the hole it came out of if you give me a few minutes.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw that I had fallen into a small chamber. It was not man made, but a cyst in the otherwise rocky hillside. There wasn’t a floor, just a further jumble of rocks. There were long ribs and a scattering of vertebrae and a jaw bone with molars – I was not the first mammal to have been here. Far above my head, a sideways winter sun ray illuminated an opaque triangle, a yellow beam highlighting the spin of dust. I stood on my toes, raised my arms towards the light, and saw my fingers in silhouette. The hole was at least 12 feet deep.
Phones can double as flashlights, but I only used mine for a moment. In the bright beam of direct light, the rubble that surrounded me took on the overshadowed drama of a face lit from below – accentuated protrusions, dark shadows, disfigured proportions, enhanced verticality. As I looked around, wondering if I was in the entrance to an old quarry, shadows bent and danced, light caught and held. Motes of dust sparkled without gravity, a disorienting optical illusion that reminded me of rock show pyrotechnics and abandoned houses. Phone light off, eyes adjusted to the quarter light, my environment seemed less visually dramatic.
*
Just before I left on my hike, I finished reading the Japanese novel The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada. In that story, a young woman falls into a hole that she may have hallucinated in a state of extreme boredom and personal meaninglessness. Only later, when her doddering grandfather-in-law also falls into a hole, is her reality cautiously confirmed.
I liked that the short book allowed for gaps in reality to efficiently swallow believability, and that the pivots in the plot were not burdened with explanation or philosophical lessons. My family is full of therapists, ministers, career coaches, teachers and musical theatre hobbyists. I alone am not in the business of tidying up stories for public consumption. I am not sure I can make anyone’s life better. I recoil from moralising, sermonising or packing meaning into every loose corner until there is no space to breathe.
What resists us might save us.
I had fallen straight down and landed squarely on my feet. I had no scrapes or cuts. I was amazed that both my femurs were intact, ankles unshattered, neck unsnapped. I did not understand how I had simply arrived in this chamber of crumbling rock.
I wondered if I had experienced a lapse in consciousness. I had lived the fast cut from one scene to another that only happens in movies and dreams and novels. I blinked from sunny stomping to subterranean standing. I had been abducted by the dark.
Looking up through the swirling dust, I saw that the oculus was crossed with branches. I had stomped straight down into this place, and the inflexible bushes grabbed my daypack and slowed my fall. What resists us might save us.
*
For years, I made large-scale realistic drawings of holes in the ground: pit mines, bomb craters, missile silos and other scenes of planetary perforation. I had multiple motivations. I wanted to show people what our world really looks like, what we don’t want to look at or are not allowed to look at. I wanted to show the counter reality to the piles of consumable goods and trash. I wanted an excuse to go to the edges of the allowed map.
I have been arrested for photographing oil fields, even though I stood on top of a slide in a public playground with my camera. I was hauled into the offices of cement plants and military bases for being where I was not supposed to be. I learned that the government can classify a photograph but cannot control the creation and distribution of art. So I taught myself to recreate photographs with attention, pencils and erasers. I used substances like radioactive charcoal, pulverised mining debris and dust swept from the tread of army trucks to make my drawings.
*
My hands and feet began testing out combinations of grabs and toeholds with an animal instinct that did not feel at all normal. Nothing is normal when you are in the bottom of a hole on a mountainside on an island in a foreign country and no one knows where you are. There are few situations where gravity is all that matters, all that there is, and all that you need to overcome.
People like to tell me how brave they think I am. I find myself asserting how introverted I am. As every rock I grabbed or stepped on tumbled down, I began imagining the tales people would tell of Nina disappearing from the island. The speculative stories would be much more outrageous and enigmatic than my being dead, in the bottom of a hole, desiccated and covered in yellow dust.
I had already thought that I should not tell my mom about falling in this hole. Not that she would lecture me on what I did wrong, but she would make me tell this story over and over again. She is a trauma therapist because she loves a good story. She helps people learn to laugh at what does not kill them. I needed to get out of the hole so it could become my story.
*
Once on the last day of a backpacking trip in Alaska, I was clinging to the sharp edge of a glacier with a full pack and no crampons. Beneath the edge of my nervous feet, cascades of pea-sized pebbles revealed sheer black ice beneath. I needed to go up, not down. The syncopation of step slip, step slip, step had been happening for over an hour. Rain washed tears from my face.
My poet friend, a nimble footed Alaskan, had long ago reached the ledge above me, and looked helplessly down on my struggle. I think he knew I wanted to give up. Suddenly, he leaned over, hands on hips, bent at the waist, and yelled ‘CHEESEBURGER!’ so loudly I felt like he bellowed it right in my face. And I scrambled straight up to where he stood. He was frustrated and just wanted to be out of the rain, back in town, eating a cheeseburger. But it became our code word for getting through something, and the turning point from terror to triumph.
The turning point in a story is known as the peripeteia. The moment of transformation, the introduction of metaphor, the turn towards resolution – this is the difference between a story and retelling. Peripeteia comes from the Greek root peri, to turn, and pet, to fly or to fall.
*
The day that I arrived on the island, Donald Trump was elected to his second term in office. The islanders tried to comfort me by describing what episodes of fascist leadership had not destroyed in their ancient democracy – community, culture, writing, and art making. An old man told me that when their books were destroyed and their words censored, they simply wrote new ones using squid ink. The next day, I was handed a small clear plastic container with a lid, the kind that holds salad dressing in a take out order. It held something black and slow. It smelled like sentient sea.
Squid ink has the texture of tahini – thick, pasty, grainy and consistent. There are no chunks, and it does not form a skin. The gelatinous viscosity of the ink means it needs to be thinned to be used with a brush or pen, otherwise it would be like trying to paint with black peanut butter. Squid ink is made to be dispersed in water, as squids rarely encounter air. There is evidence that after a squid squirts its ink into the water and the squid darts away, the ink responds to the squid’s intentions for a few moments. It has been observed pursuing the hunter and assuming opaque shapes to better obfuscate the prey. Squid ink is an external thought, an autonomous shadow, an intimate weapon, a controllable cloud. Mixing the ink with water in my studio, there was always a moment of resistance in the ink before it released and dispersed.
The only things I had in the hole were rocks and gravity. I wanted to overcome the gravity and get on top of the rocks and be out of the hole. I began pulling rocks out of the walls with greater intention and stacking them against one side of my subterranean chamber. I could barely see what I was doing, so I tested each addition to the pile by kicking it, standing on it until it settled. The rocks were not so big that I was straining to lift them. They were not too small to feel inconsequential to my process. I thought about the thousands of stone walls zig-zagging across the island and understood that the rock-to-human-hand-size ratio had done something important and historic, inspiring and allowing a closing in of land, saying: that is yours, this is mine, stay there, I own this, this is mine, this is mine. Under the horizon, I was fenced in. This body, this is mine. This is all that I own that matters. This is mine.
*
Kneeling on the hard marble floor of the studio, I pooled water on a white rectangle of paper. Then, with an eyedropper or a paint brush or fingertip, I introduced the recently living black. I thought that squid ink would have a purple tinge, but it is the same darkness as the bottom of the ocean, the farthest recess of a cave, the interior of a body, the inside of the original blackhole. Store-bought ink wants to equally spread its molecules and leave a ubiquitous stain. I saw the squid ink be shy, hesitant, self contained, waiting for a directive. Mesmerised, I watched the black shoot out exploratory tendrils, creep along the edges of the lens of liquid, or charge across the page with a sudden herd-like stampede. I could not uncurl my body from my kneeling and watching, as the shine of wet turned opaque, the animal movement stilled, the living drying into art.
*
I do not have a clear memory of stacking rocks in the hole other than a pleasant sense of progress. Aside from the initial and short lived scramble of adrenaline in my blood and my hands on the walls, I was calm. Perhaps I was having fun. Stack a few rocks, stand on top of them, lift my arms above my head, see my fingers getting closer to the beam of sunlight. It felt good to have a simple singular task.
I made a pool of ink and water and saw the world reflected on its surface.
For two years, I had been looking through a kaleidoscope of personal loss. I got misdiagnosed with breast cancer. I came out as asexual and several of my friends pulled back in fear that I was rejecting all relationships, not just the never-comfortable sex/dating/ romance ones. My dad died. A dog I loved died. My van exploded. A mouse ate my computer. The holes that I had drawn, the bomb craters and pit mines and industrial scars, suddenly seemed too big and impersonal. I had a hole in me, so many holes in me, and everyone else I knew had them too. I made a pool of ink and water and saw the world reflected on its surface.
Not all inks and paints are permanent. Some of them dissolve and lift off the paper when wet. This quality is technically measured as an ink’s fugitivity. Squid ink is incredibly fugitive. I painted the blackest of black holes, and then by pooling more liquid on top, it gave up its grip on the paper. The ink rises. The ink is liquid again. Dark that refuses gravity. Dark lifting off. Dark wanting to disperse. Dark that forgets how to stay dark. Fugitive dark.
Stacking rocks to create a ramp out of the hole became repetitive and mechanical. Meditative. My mind, following familiar synaptical ruts, pursued the thought that no one was going to believe me that I had fallen into a hole on an island. For years, I have been accused of making things up. Owen Davis actually did crawl through the doggie door and steal all the liquor in the house. I asked him at the high school reunion. Yes, I have been struck by lightning three times, unscathed, unlikely as it seems.
My aunt once told me that my life was incredible, and then she said, ‘Do you know the literal definition of incredible? Without credibility. No one believes you.’ I found a diamond ring in a sandy desert. I died and came back to life. I rode a ski lift with Harrison Ford. I had worms living under the skin of my ankles, thought my grandparents had a secret pet donkey, accidentally blew up a tree with a half stick of dynamite, and saw a rainbow that lasted for five hours. My life is extraordinary. There is nothing ordinary about it. It is incredible.
TOP IMAGE:
Liz Miller-Kovacs
Darvaza Pietà
from the series ‘Supernatural’
Darvaza gas crater, Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan
Darvaza gas crater, also known as the ‘Gates of Hell’, has been burning for over 50 years and releasing carbon
emissions. In 1971, Soviet engineers drilled the site as a natural gas well, but it collapsed. To prevent poisonous
gases from escaping, the engineers lit the crater on fire. The Pietà evokes images of the grieving Virgin Mary.
Dark Mountain: Issue 28
Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world
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