Conversations in the Sedgwick.

Rona Lee, Jean Boyd, Louise K Wilson.

In collaboration with director Dr Liz Hide, we propose the archive and store of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge (where Rona is an affiliated researcher) as our rocky environment. Designed by Cowper Griffith Architects and opened 2019, it houses the collection and archive of the Sedgwick Museum; inaugurated 1904 and founded on the collection of Dr John Woodward, Professor of Physik (Medicine) 1665 – 1728.

Purpose built and incorporating reinforced deep-pile foundations, from which we have a handful of Cambridgeshire clay, the Collections Research Centre houses over 350,000 rocks. Having a combined tonnage of around 50,000kg; each is carefully weighed before storage in the stacks of Forbes Main Store to safely distribute this mass over the building’s footprint.

In strata of shelving, drawers, boxes, labels and data, an aggregate geology of matter and meaning is assembled. We are interested in conversing with this displaced rockscape as a spectral and simultaneously volumetric environment – responding to the economic, scientific and personal mobilities /energies that formed it: opening drawers, handling specimens, re-voicing narratives of classification and exploring tensions between understandings of rocks as specimens, entities or exemplars.

The archive reorders and differentiates matter that has been dislodged, broken and dispersed across the planet. It is spectral: housing the lingering presence of the past, the enigmatic nature of these materials, and the allure of partial knowledge. It is this latency to which we are drawn and what might yet be unearthed from it and brought to light.

What happens if we give voice to these rocky individuals and the absences left by their extraction; or if these rocky masses and mineral fragments, refusing immobility, begin instead to dance, setting the archive in motion as an unstable geologic process, of new sedimentations, metamorphoses and foldings that cannot be so easily fixed?