Tim Edensor
Moving Rocks; Rocks on the Move
Recently, there has been something of a rocky turn. An academic surge of interest in the lithic has been stimulated by theoretical explorations of new materialism, post-phenomenology and the non-human that have supplemented the traditional investigations of geology and geomorphology. Simultaneously, creative practitioners have engaged in wildly diverse artistic encounters with stone, bypassing the traditional focus on stone sculpture, whose practitioners themselves adopt divergent approaches to shaping and forming different kinds of lithic material. These myriad new perspectives towards research and art underline that rock, like all material forms and substances, is always excessive, can be sensorially experienced, interpreted, utilised, sorted and scrutinised from countless perspectives. They demand that we become attentive and attuned to rocky substances and entities in new ways, exposing unnoticed textures and constituents, absences and traces, summoning up overlooked historical trajectories, vanished relations, future scenarios and persistent connections with other places, times and people. They spawn unexpected affects and sensations, and solicit stories replete with rocky multiplicities.
In seeking to foreground their weight, mass and texture, recent artistic engagements with rocky forms and objects avoid reshaping lithic components with saw and chisel. Richard Long’s rocky circles and lines are assembled to reconfigure a sensory apprehension of the landscapes in which they are sited, Sean Scully geometrically arranges compressed blocks of rough stone, Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds enclose massive erratics within encircling stone walls, and Michael Heizer’s 340 ton boulder, Levitated Mass forms a rough arch situated above a pathway, accentuating its colossal weight.
Each of the artists in the live broadcasts featured in Rocky Futures also exhibit an intimacy with rock, yet they understand and interact with stone in very different, less interventionist ways. These differing approaches stimulate a plethora of reflections and affects, and in so doing, all underline that there is no essential, singular perspective that might disclose any lithic essence or fundamental way of knowing rocky matter. They exemplify Kathleen Stewart’s (1996: 5) focus upon the ‘haunting or exciting presence of traces, remainders and excess uncaptured by claimed meanings’, drawing out the superfluities that reside in rocks while inviting speculation, imagination, memories and the making of connections.
Their concern with rocks intersects with the outpouring of conceptual and empirical work associated with a renewed focus on mobilities. Like all matter, rocks are caught up in ‘different relations and durations of movement, speed and slowness (Latham and McCormack, 2004: 705). The live broadcasts contributions reveal the hugely varied forms of mobility in which rocks become entangled, mobilities of extraordinarily diverse scales, speeds, temporalities and spatialities. In making sense of the abundance of ideas and feelings they raise, I now discuss some of the themes addressed by the contributors to Rocky Mobilities.
Inhuman and Non-Human Mobilities
Rocks are composed of matter that undergoes often imperceptible, incremental, relentless change. Indeed, though human perception and temporal experience makes this difficult to grasp, Jeffrey Cohen (2015: 34) insists that stone is fluid when viewed within a context of deep time, ‘part of a continually moving lithosphere’ that extends beyond the earth to distant galaxies. The incessant roil of lithic matter within the inner Earth’s mantle is fuelled by enormous currents driven by the heat radiating from the core. This inner churn drives the tectonic plates that glide across the earth, creating slowly emerging mountains and rifts in the Earth’s crust, along with volcanic eruption and earthquakes, while magma cools to form igneous rock and metamorphizes other lithic material with which it comes into contact.
Arising from tectonic collision aeons ago, the igneous rocks of the Canadian Shield in Eastern Manitoba are some of the oldest on earth, as Sarah Fuller details in her engaging, interactive live encounter with an isolated, colossal erratic deposited by the ice sheet in a snow-clad forest. The erratic was not only thrust into being as part of an ancient mass of rock but was moved as a separate entity by glacier to reside in its current location.
Besides volcanic and glacial forces, a swirl of other agencies shift lithic matter. Wind blows stony grains across space, rainfall and gravity create rock landslides and tides smooth pebbles and produce sand. Riverine flows carry mineral and organic particles to seabeds where over millennia, compressive forces forge them into layers of sedimentary rock. Carboniferous limestone strata formed from the countless bodies of diverse marine creatures are sculpted by water into fantastic pavements, riven with hollows, fissures and blocks. The water cascades through the cracks, merging into streams that carve out fabulously shaped underground caves. However, as Holly Vaselka discusses, such landscapes are susceptible to human exploitation, including those currently being devastated in Texas.
Perdita Phillips, broadcasting from Lake Richmond in Western Australia, focused on the rare thrombolites that grow there, uncanny entities recorded in fossil records dating back to the earliest forms of life of 3.4 billion years ago. Constituted by clots created by biotic communities of algae, bacteria and other tiny organisms that bind minerals suspended in calcium carbonate rich water into round stony forms, they are sometimes referred to as living, breathing rocks. Now largely displaced by more advanced lifeforms that subsequently evolved, they exemplify one of the innumerable ways in which the organic and mineral move together and separate, implicitly interrogating the distinction between these categories.
At a smaller scale, and as new materialist thinking underlines, the apparent stillness of rocks belies how like all substances, it is vital, continuously moving. Composed of countless particles that ceaselessly cohere, separate and change. Indeed, the perception that anything is solid and separate is illusory, for as Yussof and Gabrys (2006: 447) contend, things are ‘made up of the spin of microscopic particles which will eventually split, decay and transform’. Smith et al (2008: 447) claim, ‘all stones carry within them stress histories or legacies of previous conditions that have affected their composition and structure’. In the constitution of the visible chemical composition of the sarsen stones of Avebury, Fay Stephens shows us how silica seeped into the sandstone to replace gaps vacated by previous ingredients.
In her intimate exploration of the erratic, Fuller pays attention to the shifting non-human agencies that colonise, surround and shelter under the rock. The momentous ice that moved the boulder here also scoured the land. But over the intervening millennia, soil has formed, fostering the growth of the forest and the surrounding ferns and horsetails. As the rock has aged, lichen and moss have exploited cracks to populate its surfaces. Timber wolves, wolverines, and bears are diverted around the erratic, birds perch on its planes and small, burrowing mammals shelter beneath its mass.
Human movements of stone
Besides the material vitality and numerous non-human agencies that perpetually shift rocky substances and things, humans also redistribute the lithic matter of the world. For instance, a city is a perpetually emerging material assemblage that is depleted, supplemented and restored at different temporalities according to aesthetic, technical, political and economic imperatives (Edensor, 2020). As part of this continuous, dynamic urban reconstitution, rocky matter is ceaselessly imported and removed, and deployed anew in the composition of buildings, walls, kerbs and statues. Other human practices move rocky matter around: mining and quarrying are accompanied by landfilling with unwanted rock, while millions of tonnes of ballast that weighed down pre-20th century cargo ships travelled between ports (Burström, 2017). When these mobilities cease as supplies dwindle, fashions change and businesses fail, rocky things become marooned, detached from the networks that gave them meaning and purpose (Edensor, 2013). Subsequently, other stony matter is reassembled to form new elements of place, enfolded into different networks of supply and disposal.
Fay Stephens focuses upon a rock that was moved to its present location by humans around five thousand years ago, one of the charismatic sarsen stones installed as part of the giant Neolithic complex at Avebury, Wiltshire. There is an abiding mystery about how such hefty forms were moved to constitute giant lithic assemblies in an era without complex technology. Other great Neolithic petroglyphs, megaliths and dolmens, sculpted and sited in auspicious places, possess a charisma that continues to inspire speculative visions about their use and meaning amongst archaeologists, tourists, cosmologists and new agers.
More substantive, machine-driven mobilities are part of the immense operations to extract lithic matter that were supercharged during the industrial revolution. Such extractions are now recognised as fundamental to the climate crisis that we confront. Holly Veselka deploys virtual mapping, 3-D modelling and simulated aerial photography to explore how the spectacular Karst limestone landscape at San Marcos, Texas, is being devasted by extensive mining for lime for concrete production, erasing its distinctive features and effacing the rich myths that focus upon this poetic and mysterious permeable realm, with its underworlds and channels. Vaselka seeks to reintroduce a sense of mystery through the glitches and absences generated through photogrammetry.
Yet such human material construction and terraforming will leave only minor traces aeons after the Anthropocene has been superseded by geological periods to come. In the dynamic, mobile lithosphere that we inhabit, thin layers of rock will be compressed by future earth movements and imbued with traces of metals, bricks, concrete and plastics.
Rocky Provocations: Human mobilities with and around stones
Several presentations emphasise that stone also solicits human corporeal or technological manoeuvres. Urban pedestrians must adjust to rocky cobbles or smooth pavements, and must navigate around solid stone structures, such as monuments. In the live broadcasts, a range of movements on and with stone are enacted. In explore the cracks and textures in the erratic from which she broadcasts, Fuller reflects on her memories of climbing, the quest for potential fingerholds and ledges, while Clare McCracken climbs up to the summit of a mighty rock to bask on its sun-baked surface.
Rather differently, Terrain erratique, an audacious performance undertaken by Brass Art, whose members are Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican, shifts a sensorial encounter with another large erratic. Originally spewed out from the earth during a violent volcanic eruption and subsequently transported from the Lake District 20 thousand years ago by glacier, the rock was unearthed in 1888 while digging a sewer. Since then, it has been situated in a quadrangle adjacent to Manchester Museum and stands as an implacable geological memorial. Ingeniously floating a flimsy aluminium foil sheet into the air by using gas-filled balloons, they let it fall to entirely cover the huge rock. The transformation from a stony to a metallic surface seems somehow improper, an affront to the dignity of the monolith; as the foil ripples in the breeze, it offers a contrast to the stillness of the rock, offering a momentary interruption to its sober presence.
Other playful engagements also testify to the sensory and affective experiences of engaging with rocky matter. Fritha Jenkins brings sandstone fragments and dust from Blackhill Quarry in Leeds, honouring artist Edna Lumb, who painted this site of extraction along with other industrial sites. Jenkins recalls the visceral explosions, the rockfaces, the water sprayed onto the quarry face, the huge tyre prints, the stone cutting and the noise during their own visit to the quarry. They broadcast from the liquefied shoreline of the Thames shore in central London, site of mudlarking and near to the Blackfriars Bridge, the pillars of which are constructed from the Blackhill sandstone. Jenkins mixes the rocks with water, manually plays with them and quantities of dust, in an exuberant performance that concludes with a celebratory dance to the pulsing rhythms of Bronski Beat’s version of I Feel Love, signifying their discovery of a piece of glitter, a vestige of a queer disco that they had attended, that was lodged in their shoe as they explored Blackhill Quarry. This sensuous, ludic interaction with rocks illustrates how, as John Harries (2017: 115) maintains, ‘touch inaugurates a more “proximal” way of knowing’ that ‘proceeds from a reflexive appreciation of the bodily experience of dwelling in the world’. In our touch, he contends, ‘we rediscover the lively being of stone and clay and, through this tactile understanding, some appreciation of the lived experience of long-ago peoples’, as well as those who have worked with stone more recently.
Varying according to its porosity and permeability, rock absorbs liquids, gases, chemicals, living and dead creaturely and vegetal matter, and can register climate patterns and the spores that moved across parts of the earth over millennia. Rock also becomes part of our own bodies for it is an element of the worlds we inhabit; it gets under our skin and nails, and clogs our pores. We also inhale, eat and drink tiny portions of rock, as Kaya Barry, makes explicit as she adds stony grains to the blueberry jam that she cooks at an agricultural site in the Bundaberg region, Queensland, Australia, that is worked by seasonal workers. Agricultural produce is partly constituted by the chemicals in the soil of the locality in which they are produced, literally containing part of what viticulturalists call terroir. In enacting a performance making what she calls ‘deep-weathered jam’, Barry is making food that contains the minerals from the rich basaltic soil of the region and also draws attention to how we are always part mineral, our bodies containing tiny proportions of the lithic matter that surrounds us.
An inescapable mobile aspect of the live broadcasts is the different ways in which the images on screen shift in accordance with the different mobile manoeuvres of the camera that are deployed during participants’ diverse encounters with rocks. In some broadcasts, the camera is still, capturing the movements of the artist and other elements in the scene, or the artist moves the camera away from and towards the rock, shifting the gaze of the viewer. The camera can come up close, inspecting the countless marks and growths upon the rocky surfaces or move back to register its form and surroundings. In Veselka’s broadcast, her screen models sweep across the ever-changing configurations of vast, virtual limestone landscapes. In Rona Lee, Jean Boyd and Louise K. Wilson’s investigation of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, a torch moves across an archive, successively illuminating particular sections. In Stephens’ broadcast, an interactive element is performed wherein following the suspension of commentary for a spell, viewers are invited to scrutinise the sarsen stone as the camera moves slowly over and around it, to perhaps sketch its planes, cracks, blotches and colourings, and patches of lichen and moss through a tactile vision experienced at a distance.
Mobilities of rocky knowledge
Knowledge about rocks, as with most other realms of enquiry and mooted expertise, is always on the move. Geological, geomorphological and historical orthodoxies are supplemented, challenged and overturned. Once regarded as unseemly pagan monuments by Christian puritans, the sarsen stones of Avebury are now sources of wonder, attracting tourists and a host of theoretical speculations about their purpose. And both rocky masses moved by humans and non-humas are shifting scientific discourses and story-telling that frequently involve extensive movements. For instance, old myths tell of how divine or malevolent beings threw giant rocks across immense landscapes or left imprints on rocky surfaces as they bestrode or flew across the world. Indeed, signs of supernatural or sacred agencies seemed to abound in a world of stony configurations, forms and inscriptions (Edensor and Brophy, 2023).
Yet such understandings should not be regarded as obsolete, superseded by scientific knowledge. As Clare McCracken discusses, as she sits upon a large, granite boulder at Mount Buffalo, Victoria, Australia, violent settler colonial modes of knowing have sought to refute traditional Indigenous stories and practices. Photographic representations of this site have represented this space as a wild realm untouched by humans, resonating with its officially designation as a national park. Yet, for the Muggalums people, slaughtered or pushed to live in reserves or into agricultural work, these rocks are integral to the inhabitation of country, imbued with venerable symbolic associations and woven into cosmologies that would have been recounted in stories before dispossession, genocide and cultural erasure. For Aboriginal people conceive of the land differently – as country – in which stones and geological forces are incorporated into an understanding of place as replete with living beings, ‘an alive nurturing terrain’ saturated ‘with meaning and presence’ (Instone, 2019: 366).
I also consider scientific processes of classification to be a specific kind of storytelling through which experts share their authoritative knowledge; however, such understandings of rocky matter can only ever be partial, and ways of knowing move on. Rona Lee, Jean Boyd and Louise K. Wilson visit the University of Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, a site at which humans have endeavoured to categorise and classify a vast quantity of specimens, to advance scientific knowledge, to dispassionately grasp what is always enchanted by the allure of incomprehensible age. The contributors reveal that such rocky classifications are invariably complex and variegated, and as they come across inscriptions and lists of contents, partial and liable to degenerate, becoming replete with reinterpretations, errors, absences and lost details. The collection includes entities that migrate across different boundaries, forming a mass of things of different constituencies, histories and geographical locations, many collected during colonial adventures. They have become weird, untethered, released from classificatory confinements and thus available for reimagining. Following their performance with the foil and the erratic, , Brass Art also investigate the vagaries of geological classification, discussing a few specimens from the Manchester Museum’s collection with geologist David Gelsthorpe. They focus on objects that seem to resist systemic classification that have been moved to a special box. Part of a meteorite that landed near Wigan, tourist souvenirs of scenes impressed into molten lava, an extraordinary, petrified bird’s nest and eggs, and objects more deliberately calcified in saturated waters by artist Alanna Halperin
References
Burström, M., 2017. Ballast: Laden with History. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.
Cohen, J. (2015) Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Edensor T (2020) Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality, Melbourne: Palgrave
Edensor, T. (2013) ‘Vital urban materiality and its multiple absences: the building stone of central Manchester’, Cultural Geographies, 20(4): 447-465.
Edensor, T. and Brophy, K., 2023. The potent urban prehistory of an ancient megalith: the Kempock Stone, Gourock, Scotland. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 29(1-2), pp.81-96.
Harries, J. (2017) ‘A stone that feels right in the hand: Tactile memory, the abduction of agency and presence of the past’, Journal of Material Culture, 22(1): 110 –130
Instone, L. (2019) ‘Making the geologic with urban naturecultures: Life and nonlife on the Victorian Volcanic Plains grasslands of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia’, Geoforum, 106: 363-369.
Latham, A. and McCormack, D. (2004) ‘Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28(6): 701-724
Smith, B., Gomez-Heras, M. and McCabe, S. (2008) ‘Understanding the decay of stone-built cultural heritage’. Progress in Physical Geography, 32(4): 439-461.
Stewart, K. (1996) A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Yussof, K. and Gabrys, J. (2006) ‘Time lapses: Robert Smithson’s mobile landscapes’, Cultural Geographies, 13(3): 444-450.