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?

Caitlin Berrigan has created special commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Carpenter Center, and the deCordova Museum. Her work has shown at Storefront for Art & Architecture, Hammer Museum, Anthology Film Archives, LACMA, and Goldsmith’s London. She has received grants and fellowships from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, PROGRAM for Art & Architecture Berlin, and the Wassaic Project. She holds a Master's in visual art from MIT and a B.A. from Hampshire College. She teaches emerging media at NYU Tisch Photography & Imaging and is an affiliate of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Technology, Culture and Society.

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