'Internal Nebular' Exhibition at Haarlem Artspace

'Internal Nebular' Exhibition at Haarlem Artspace

Internal Nebular is part of a programme of events comprised of a seminar during the Wirksworth Festival, and a session of 4 further talks running until February. 

The exhibition explores the clandestine nature of geological time and the crystalline structures it forms, as well as connecting to the history of stone that is such a part of the Derbyshire landscape and Identity. The works all deal with the natural world and have a reverence towards it, whilst being sited firmly in a contemporary understanding of the ground beneath our feet.

Internal Nebular will be exhibited during the Wirksworth Festival weekends 9–10 September, 2017 10–4pm and 16 & 17th September 2017.

Exhibition Information

Dorothy Cross,
Stalactite


Stalactite  is a film of The Great Stalactite of Doolin Cave in County Clare which has grown over the course of one million years in its black chamber.
In the film a boy soprano stands beneath this spectral object, singing in a curious juxtaposition of the paces of human and geological time.

Dorothy wrote on the work:
In 2007 I went to hear a friend singing in a choir in County Clare. A beautiful small boy stood out amidst the adults singing his heart out. A few years later I learned that the second largest stalactite in the world is located in a cave near Doolin in County Clare. It is a magnificent single stalactite hanging alone in a black cave. It is ghostly white with folds of calcite dropping like vitreous fabric. It is believed to be between 600,000 and a million years old. I searched for the young singer, Ben Escorcio, and asked him if he would sing in the cave beneath the stalactite. He had a pure crystalline voice just on the edge of breaking - yet to be defined as tenor, counter tenor, baritone or bass. We built a ramp for Ben to stand directly beneath the spectral stalactite. Drips landed on his head as continuous growth deposited calcite on its tip. I asked Ben to sing without words or reference to known melody - as if pre-language. He sang with effortless beauty, his pure voice rising and falling in the deep chamber of the cave.

 

Alastair Mackie 
'Epitaph Test' 


Epitaph Test by Alastair Mackie, is a screen-printed panel of pigment formed of sandstone rock dust, this was ​taken from the quarry at nearby Hardwick Hall.
This print test from the work which ​was originally commissioned to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Robert Smythson and the men who built Hardwick Hall. 
​Epitaph was created ​using a process of three-dimensional scanning, digital re-scaling, and a five axis robotic milling machine​. A 2mm deep skin was systematically removed from the surface of a sandstone boulder from the quarry at Hardwick Hall.
The off-cut material has been collected from the milling machine’s filtration system and screen-printed to create a wall-mounted linear panel of pigment.
Commissioned by Meadow Arts for The National Trust to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Robert Smythson and the men who built Hardwick Hall.
 

Liz Orton
'This Connection Should Make Us Suspect'

Geologists take numerous photographs to document the sites of research and to create a record of conditions in the field. As rock
​ ​faces are without horizons, the scale of rock formations can be impossible to ascertain from the image itself. This is especially the case where the rock features exhibit fractal-like patterns.  
There is a failure of scale and images show indeterminate spaces.   Objects for scale are included in the photographs, to help interpret the scale of the site. The object must have a recognisable scale, and is conventionally a hammer, survey book or ruler.  Sometimes a hand or finger holds the object in place. Placed strategically, the object transforms the image from an abstraction to a record. 
There is a particular category of images in which the object for scale is the camera’s lens cap.  I have been collecting lens-cap-for-scale images for a couple of years. These circles of the lens cap – sometimes under-exposed as a solid black circle – appear like an unexpected transgression of the photographic and rocky surface (to a non-geologist). It both disrupts and expands the image, concealing what is behind and expanding what is beyond. The photographs tell us about the deep time of the earth, but also the space through which our understanding of time is produced.
Thanks especially to Jim Talbot, and to Ahmad Aghahosseini.

http://www.lizorton.co.uk/ 

 

More info on our talks programme here: https://gallery.mailchimp.com/e7f1ff9b52e717cbec082e50d/images/f1e90362-...

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