Our new sculptural sound installation for Wirksworth Festival 2024 draws
inspiration from Wirksworth’s annual Clypping ceremony to create a community of hybrid rock-plant-human people coming together to collectively embrace and speak of the land.
A mixture of voices, field sound and ambient music made with rocks fills the gallery space. Seven of the rocky heads contain speaker-mouths, each with a different story to tell.
The sound piece was crafted from interviews with local people, whose contrasting personal and professional experiences include the disciplines of medicine, geology, industry, botany, history, spirituality and politics. Moving between the voices offers up fascinating insights and original perspectives into this most holey of landscapes.
'Holes everywhere, vertical and horizontal, shafts and tunnels and soughs. A tunnel from Middleton to Harborough rocks. A tunnel from Dale Quarry to Ravenstor. Tunnels from the lead mine to the pub. Tunnels from then to now.'
The quarrying industry carves down through eons of time and once-living bodies. Peregrine Falcons wheel and dive across their naked cliffs. The toxic ground of old lead mines become humpy sanctuaries for threatened species of flowers and insects. Plants ‘speak’ the geology of landscape - through their distribution and health we can infer what lies beneath. Alpine Pennycress and Leadwort draw lead up into their leaves and flowers, reducing their own vulnerability to grazing animals, and detoxifying the land. What might these fragile survivors teach us about resilience and healing in these dangerous times?
Accompanying the installation is a new group of paintings inspired by the topography, colours, minerals and flora of local quarries and lead mines.
The paintings layer views from above at different scales. Tools of measurement, navigation and acquisition like data, diagrams, maps and plans are repurposed and abstracted so as to hold different qualities of information inside and alongside each other, muddling hierarchies and building complexity.
