Ephemeral islands, petrified raindrops, volcanic dust from Pompeii, a shared birthday with a volcano. Certain geological processes have a way of evoking a more personal response to the idea of geological time.
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Ephemeral islands, petrified raindrops, volcanic dust from Pompeii, a shared birthday with a volcano. Certain geological processes have a way of evoking a more personal response to the idea of geological time. What does a time span of 300,000,000 years actually mean? Physical Geology is an ongoing project which explores our desire to make corporeal contact with geological phenomena.
While conducting research as an Alchemy Fellow at the Manchester Museum, in the ‘oddities drawer’ of the geology department I came across a fine collection of lava medallions from Mount Vesuvius — magma pressed between forged steel plates to form an imprint (imagine a waffle iron that uses lava as batter). In the same drawer, a small stone relief sculpture appeared to be carved out of pure white alabaster. In fact, it was a limestone cast created via the same process that forms stalactites in a cave.
In re-visiting these historical geological art processes (lava forging and cave casting), I began to develop ideas for ‘physical geological art works’ – art objects formed within a geological, or deep time context. I went to Saint Nectaire, a small thermal town in the mountains of the Auvergne in France to meet with Eric Papon, whose family founded the Fontaines Petrifiantes, and the art of cave casting, seven generations ago. In a normal limestone cave it takes one hundred years for a stalactite to grow one centimeter, in caves of the Fontaines Petrifiantes one centimeter grows in one year. Every year Eric and his assistant facilitate the formation of hundreds of cave casts through a labor-intensive process involving twenty-five meter high casting ladders, carbonate waterfalls and natural rubber moulds which slowly fill with limestone deposits over the course of a year. In 2008 we began to work together in the caves.
The plan is to make a geological time diptych – new lava medallions, new cave casts – slow time and fast time alongside each other. To date, I have made a new series of cave casts which formed over the course of ten months in the calcifying springs of the Fontaines Petrifiantes. The last casts were cracked open to coincide with my 36th birthday in September 2009. The slow time component of the project is now complete.
Ancient and technologically advanced modes of production were employed to arrive at these unique objects of pure geology; including traditional copper plate etching, 3D modelling, rapid prototyping and limestone encrustation.
In a volcanic prologue to the fast time component, I spent time encountering active lava flows as they formed new land on Big Island, Hawaii. To complete the project, lava stamping implements are ready and waiting for a molten river to emerge from another volcano – Etna, where the art of lava forging emerged. To carry out this action, volcanologists have agreed to work together at the edge of the next flow. This may occur in one moment or within a lifetime.
PHYSICAL GEOLOGY: From 2008 to date…
Physical Geology is an ongoing and vast body of work composed of new geological sculptures that have formed and are still forming, across the surface of the earth. For the last 18 years, I have been slowly amassing a new sculptural geology collection, making work which employs naturally occurring geological processes to form each object.
To articulate a corporeal sense of geological time, the sculptures form using processes that change within our own lifespans – from high velocity calcifying springs in France to geothermal pools in Japan. New limestone sculptures formed in a petrifying cave in the Auvergne sit alongside objects which were submerged in the run off pool from the Geothermal Power Plant which feeds the Blue Lagoon, encrusted in fresh mineral deposits. These new geological artefacts have formed in days; over weeks and years. This constellation of culturally occurring landmass continues to grow with each new geologically active field site. Only months before the pandemic emerged, new experimental sculptures were growing larger every day within a remarkable calcifying spring called Kibetani Onsen, which adjoins one of the only active geysers in Japan. Now, they are out of the water. At the start of the year, new grown sculptures from France arrived in Edinburgh for Fruitmarket – the work growing in the same time frame as the exhibition unfolded.
When objects are left to rapidly encrust in new layers of stone, they become part of a unique geologic cultural alliance. Each new chapter – or generation – of geological sculptures has been shown in venues ranging from Contemporary Art Museum contexts to Natural History and historical Anatomy collections, with presentation and display approaches reflecting those contexts, from the hand held to the museological. One of the youngest generations of this endeavour is entitled The Rock Cycle and formed part of the exhibition There is a Volcano Behind My House at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute in 2021.
This new geologic body of work asks us to articulate through culture, new ways of cultivating our understanding of and relationship with our fragile ecological world. My hope is that through merging a more daily and geological sense of time, we may begin to understand ourselves as part of a deep time continuum.