Paused
Categories: Studio Practice, Place Related
Media: Sea-worn local sandstone rocks (Upper Greensand), pillar drill and various drill bits.
2020
I had collected these nine strangely uniform sea-worn sandstone rocks a couple of years back from nearby Compton beach. They looked like typographic dashes and to further that, I had in mind drilling an ellipsis (three full stops) into the surface to indicate the pause I had created by extracting them from their natural geological habitat and interrupting the process of wearing further away.
When the pandemic came, I thought about them again and they took on more gravity as a work to undertake at a time when the whole world was put on hold. Each small circular incision made feels both like a collaboration with the stone and a penance. The use of a pillar drill and a variety of both suitable and unsuitable drill bits, a slow procedure and a balance of powered device-controlled assistance and hand-eye instinctive judgement.
Given the nature of the circumstances under which they were created, I intend to deliver the stones back to the sea, to 'unpause' them, when the worst of the virus has passed.
Until then I plan to display them in a shrine built at Ever Garden. See work in progress images.
