Imaginary Explosions is an artist book, a book of poetry and topological delineation. It is a book by artist Caitlin Berrigan which has been a few years in the making - fitting for events that span generations. Its pages explore geological ruptures, the immense scale and deep time of sexual violence, and the ways traumas reverberate through bodies across multiple generations of relationships and families.
It is an experiment in sequential, narrative poetry. Sparse, material language combines with drawings based on the computational radar topography of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano from the National Land Survey of Iceland. It draws from storytelling and geological time and space through episodes of vulcanology. Can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of geological change, and human intervention within it, by embodying it at the human scale—by in fact becoming mineral ourselves?
