Mist hugs the land in its ghostly grip troubling the delineation between solid and vapour; hazy, impermeable. The air edgeless filled with water held in transformative stillness – silent sublimation

As if the clouds fell in need of a fixed place to rest

For months, I’ve been going to these places, thinking and writing about them, photographing and taking little pieces of them away with me. My material dictionary, It feels like discovering a new landscape every time - this slow steady mental excavation.

Atop the hill hovers the ghost of displaced land, hauled height mined then moved downwards to form the pier. Two thick arms of extracted stone stretch out into the water and around to hug the harbour. Over there a face of granite carves a course among the coarse vegetation in jutting lines and angles. Stout shrubbery bushes and brambles hostile to any matter, especially that as soft as skin or fibrous fabric. At the zenith of the sun, the shadow cast by the grey plutonic pillar of the obelisk will point directly North. Constructed to commemorate the year of slaughter. The hillock on which it is perched lies the haunting remains of a prehistoric tomb.

Sometimes you can hear the whispers calling home.

Stories soaked in suffering

Wretched earth

'There is for me no symmetry at all between destroying and regenerating, those are two completely different things. You can destroy without knowing. Generating, regenerating, is a matter of fostering and learning, noticing and all of that, everything that destroying does not entail. Destroying is merely a matter of extracting.’

Isabelle Stengers et al., Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse

fuels minerals behaviour plants animals

I have always been fascinated by quarries, large unearthed pits of excavated landscape. The lines of past present and futures are written into the rock, banded stratigraphy bound by the weight of gravity and time. The spaces where stone has been removed echo with a ghostly presence. What is left in the wake of absence? A hole is as defined by the form of its negation, its edges ever unreachable. Does the stone seep its stories into the places it is brought to? If you listen closely enough, can you hear it hissing?

Some of the first Catacombs were constructed in the 1st Century, meticulously excavated, labyrinthine and layered like a termite mounds. They were then re-filled with bodies now dead, of those who had once lived above it. Matter removed to then be replaced by another. Fossils to flesh.

Great pounding of extraction compressing the earth

Little pieces of rock, sediments of memories are carried downstream among the slow shifting tides of limestone.

My body is sand and sick and shrinking whilst the wet red sky bears witness to my erasure.

In years to come you will ask me why and I’ll tell you it was all for a performance.

I am a collapsing star.

I am a star of the morning and like Lucifer, I want to be thrown from heaven for changing the order of the sacred words.

Rebel against the father and son in the creation of new worlds of wickedness.