terrain erratique

Brass Art

Erratics, meteors, scholar stones and hag stones infuse our artistic practice. We use them to think through temporal concerns – the out-of-time-ness of a meteor, or the slow movement of a glacial erratic in comparison to human action. We are particularly interested in the part standing in for the whole – the erratic as part of the terrain erratique, as well as the instability this implies.

Geological specimens form the bedrock of our Still Life series, forming large-scale shadow-play installations. They also appear in more intimate collaged work, with layers of pierced and cut-through forms, creating multi-dimensional environments. Negative space is central to our work and most often features as shadow or aperture. Like adder stones they reveal new connections between distant objects through which an isolated detail, gesture, or landscape can be seen anew.

The opportunity of a live event allows us to ‘re-story’ our connection with mineralogy specimens through a direct, physical engagement with the Manchester Museum erratic. In conversation with Dr David Gelsthorpe, specialist in palaeontology and historical geology, we will situate the erratic as a marker of deep time, bridging both geological time and human action. It is between these two registers of knowing that Manchester’s glacial erratic provides a genealogical and geological link with our interest in deep time and unstable landscapes, in dialogue with Kircher’s scientific representations of the earth’s volcanic innards and speculative imaginings of the sun’s erupting surface.

Revisiting our interest in artistic ‘care’, linked to 3D/4D scanning and conservation methods, we  wrapped the erratic, dredged from the deep past, with silvered foil to make a reflective occlusion in the museum, and ask how can forms of gesture and touch address the erratics in their resting place? And what is the mobility of mineralogy samples sheared from their origins?