COMMISSION

Step in Stone project 2015
Geology of the Eastern Mendip

Commission to create indoor and outdoor work for the Step in Stone art-in-quarries project.

The idea of the project was to give visitors an opportunity to encounter contemporary artworks while exploring the spectacular wild landscapes of abandoned and working quarries in rural East Mendip. Artists were commissioned to produce work in response to the nature of quarries and their place in the environmental, cultural and industrial heritage of the region.

Deep Time Portals Map
I chose to focus specifically on the geology visible in the quarries and made a series of works for three locations that drew attention to the age and make up of the rocks of the area. I approached the project by first creating a map of all the quarries in the Eastern Mendip area, used and disused. All other detail was eliminated to bring the focus purely on the quarry sites and the ages of the rocks they revealed. The map was reproduced at a large scale and installed in the style of a standard outdoor interpretation panel at Westdown Quarry – a ‘YOU ARE HERE’ symbol located the visitor.

Deep Time Geo Magnets
This installation of fridge magnets in a display stand is made based on a selection of microscopic scans of rock samples from the Eastern Mendip. The four rows of the display represent the sequence of time periods and rock types in this area – Andesite from the Silurian period, Old Red Sandstone from the Devonian period, Black Rock Limestone from the Carboniferous period and Doulting Stone from the Jurassic period. The magnets show a variety of different scan processes used by geologists to examine rocks and determine the climate and processes that occurred to create them. The concept of using fridge magnets was designed to re-present something unseen and largely unknown in a form that was highly accessible and familiar to a general audience.

 

 

This work was supported by the Climate and Landscape Change research programme and the Mineralogy and Petrography team at the British Geological Survey who made scans of rock samples from different quarries in the Mendip area.

Additional artwork created for the project included a display case of ‘geo code specimens’ – based on a stratigraphic column and the colour and symbol coding systems on geological maps and a Cabinet of Deep Time containing my research and things I discovered along the way.