Taken on trip to Whiteadder Water, 2024
Taken on trip to Whiteadder Water, 2024
2024
Supported by Assemblage Arts Collective
Working with my brother Ben, a jazz drummer and sound artist, to create a number of short videos based on interviews with people who work with sediment in various forms and recorded ‘Pulverizations’ inspired by Robert Smithson’s A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1966). ‘Pulverizations’ or artistic processes focused on sedimentation of matter he believed were basic and essential to understanding the true nature of life and our relationship to the earth. He positions these processes as contrary to ‘Technological Idealism’. Thinking about this in terms of life and death, and if we take away our fear, we are left seeing ourselves very much part of Smithson’s Pulverizations. We connect to the earth by dust, our sediment blowing in the wind to join the earth. It’s interesting to think about stone workers skin, wearing on hard rocks they work to reduce, mixing with layers back on the earth’s surface.
The series starts with the artist Michelle De Bruin reflecting on her experiences carving stone.
This work is developing from ongoing conversations with my brother about the North Yorkshire village we grew up in. We've been thinking about the village ‘rituals’ such as the yearly ‘Village Feast’ as one of many pedagogical ‘encounters’ or events through which we learnt to think about ourselves as ‘local’, identifying ourselves as part of a unique set of people. This is leading us to think about why some belonged and others didn’t.
Gormires Wood
A recent visit with friends and family to a wood near where I grew up, prompted a conversation about how comfortable we would feel walking in the Yorkshire countryside on our own. It was clear that most felt they wouldn’t do it. This is the starting point of work that looks to understand the ‘barriers’ around the wood, who can pass and who can’t. The sound element is been developed by Ben Grant