Sticky Overwhelm

Overwhelm is fact of life.

Quickly, after the perception of the forensic architecture of contemporary life begins, a concept forms of a fizzing set of constantly moving matters expanding out like an atomic mushroom cloud connecting and infecting all other matters, somehow, somewhen, with the same erupting fizziness. 

So when you try to extract yourself. Come out of your entangled project. Come up for air. Which you have to do. You will know the air you breathe is also connected and full of the material and matter which you are also otherwise connected to in many different ways. 

Yet you have decided to try and tease that out and think about it. And this dismantling will begin to hurt. This stuff is your life. Is life itself. And if you make it a constant problem, you become the problem too. So, how do you cope with that? Well, there is a point at which you have to let go and be reconciled with the fact that your existence shares space with this stuff.

My point is that it doesn't have to be a constant problem. Practicing resilience in these times of fast ecological change means there are times when it is possible to dip in and look at it, and others when you have to let it go. Back away, let yourself become reconciled. Also, some of these fizzing connections are yours, and yours alone to tug at. And still, much of fizzing life is pretty wonderful and will remain so.

New Work - Calthemitic Sticky Thinking - Research Tool

Calthemitic Sticky Thinking:
trans-life collaboration with matter as mentor.

Research Poster for MA Contemporary Art & Archaeology Final Project about lithic more-than-human mentorship.

The probably too-teensy text says:

Calthemite, a pseudo-karst also termed ‘urban stalactite’ – ‘grows’ under aged concrete urban architectures.  In response to pollutive airborne particulate found in them, this study investigates calthemite ‘archaeologists of airs’ as creative collaborators and mentors.  Ideas of affective and creepy lithic agency draws on Jane Bennett’s vital materiality1 and Mark Fisher’s interpretation of the uncanny2. The weird and creepy signposted speculative approaches to exploring contemporary archaeologic space by creative art archaeology practice.

Attempts were also made to respond to needs for humility in ecological understanding, navigate different vulnerabilities produced within the trans-life collaboration, and uncover calthemite pasts within urban and cement production landscapes.

The outcome; a deck of 16 awareness cards and a booklet suggests serendipitous prompts can filter research archives and widen human consciousness to lithic being in trans-life collaborations.

 

1.Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

2.Fisher, M. (2016) The weird and the eerie. London: Repeater Books

 

Images:
Centre: 3D Polycam scan of calthemite on Coventry Canal Basin Footbridge. Background: High res scan of calthemite deposit on a maple leaf. Collected in Coventry, May 2024. Small image: Mentorship meeting. Coventry, March 2025.

  

 

 

Task_Re_negotiation

Cabinets of Renegotiation at East Side Projects, Summer Camp. 

There’s always a bit of nervousness inside curiosity when I hand over a work, but it looked like it would all be ok. Many other submissions had already been hung and the curation was already looking pretty tender and interesting. 

https://eastsideprojects.org/esp/projects/show/

Besides, I had fair confidence in curators Lucy Grubb and Harman Randawa, and art technician Tammy Woodrow who turned out a splendid job of curating my piece. The splendid convergence of yellow lines, which are not part of the work (although they sort of are), are artist/curator co-founder of Eastside Projects, Gavin Wade’s decision to re-stage a Sol LeWitt work throughout the gallery walls. There were also pebbles, just visible in the 2nd photo, arranged throughout the gallery by Lucy Grubb. I felt part of an exposition of scattered harmony.

This version of Cabinets arrives as a kind of kit and a provocation to the curator to take part in a new convergence of objects and humanity. There is a fabric sculpture which is a kind of pillowy representation of the ground that has pockets in it with a wooden dowel that gets screwed into the wall as support. It comes with a wrapped pack of things that I've collected that can stick into the pockets. If I can I try to add something collected on my way to the gallery. They get re-used with this work and another called 'Mapping Sloughing' in a kind of things-go-round sharing deal. 

They mostly come from land around my studio, which is near a train station and a retail park. A mass of indistinct people pass through this space but there is also a grand mass of more stable inhabitants in the shape of plants and trees, and other creatures, birds, rodents and insects, most of whom I haven't met. I won't list everything in the pack as I'm not all that interested in their individual naming, but, for example, there are broken zip ties from deliveries and a variety of organic objects like pine-cones and feathers. Together they are stuffs of lives.

I am interested in their combining and their rearrangement. For this reason, I like serendipity to continue to have a part to play in the work, so I make a point of inviting others into it. On this occasion Tammy appears to have enjoyed fitting in to almost burst as many things as she can. She has made an explosion of stuffs. I think that’s an apt portrait of the ground. However, discord and harmony are both completely acceptable states of being. 

 

Cabinets... is part of a series of similarly titled works inspired by an abiding interest in curiosity cabinets, also called wunderkammer, of the type of polished wooden glazed cabinets displayed inside homes. They were sort of domestically-situated museums, wildly popular with upper-class Europeans of the seventeenth century onwards, in which small objects were displayed to express a curiosity in other cultures, lives and places. Notably the mechanic of display separates the objects from their complex myriad contexts and brings them into new relationships. And, because sometimes these were objects brought back from lands colonised by European countries wunderkammer have become loaded with hugely problematic meanings around hierarchies, extractive geopolitics and racialised attitudes, detail which is far beyond the scope of this short post (Hannah Pethen offers a short survey from a contemporary Egyptologist p.o.v.) However, the expression of control combined with factors of curiosity and invitation to discourse which at the same time de-situates things contains some parallels with our attention to waste, and this attention, or rather inverted-attention interests me. 

It has always confused me that the current wave of humxnity that I live in struggles so much with our unbreakable bond to objects. We don't attend to them. We plainly experience the damage made by things we no longer want to use and still do nothing. We often don’t know what comprises objects. I wonder if, in trying to draw comparisons to this attention attitude we might find clues to how we can do better with the fascinating things we call waste, litter, trash, etc.

Ref: https://hannahpethen.com/2022/08/24/the-modern-wunderkammer-colonial-hangover-or-locus-of-multivocality/

Scale

definitions.

In my current project in which I zoom in and out on perceiving flowing chalk, cement and calthemite, I find I am ensconced in different meanings of the word 'scale' which, in the English language, is used in wildly different ways because it combines linguistic influences from many different peoples of the past.

A search on Google tells me that from Germanic 'scale' and Old French 'escale' is derived overlapping scales on a fish, or flakes of secondary deposit on the surface of a leaf dripped on from calthemites under a mid-century concrete building.

English also creates meaning around a pair of scales from ideas that revolve around a pair of matching bowls. It's easy to see the relation of the bowl to the concave shape of a fish scale. Here the notion of balance, measurement and ideas of fair exchange also ensue. All inherited from Old Norse 'scal' (bowl), Dutch Schaal, German 'schale' (bowl), and English 'schal' (dish). Origins depart further from the measurement potential of the bowl when the word scale is applied to values, measurement, levels and notation with the idea of progression up, down and across a regularised set of values. 

However, it is in the use of scale as a verb, 'to scale', where we find the meaning 'to climb, or clamber up', where scale relates directly to an embodied interaction with the world. From Old French comes 'escaler' (climb), Medieval Latin 'scalare' (climb) and Latin 'scandere' (to climb). Having been exposed to Robin Wall Kimmerer's own sensitisation to verbs, wherein 'to be bay' transported her into the lithic embrace of a warm breeze-swept beach, I suddenly feel the knobbly texture of cold, wind-polished, ungiving stone millimetres from my cheek and under my fingers. I flex my grip and use my legs to push myself up and over a boulder. In this embodied definition it seems that scale takes up the whole, diminished human body against a backdrop of the lithic world.

Ref: Robin Wall Kimmerer 'Braiding Sweetgrass'

Attractor/Repellant sliding scale (circular)

Tuesday 28 May. Afternoon. Searching for pebble fossils on Penally Beach. 

In the straggly line of blue slate, flint and quartz drawn by the turning tide on the beach are blooms of insulation foam. They are the coloured the same yellow as rancid butter. They float in from nobody knows where; boat-yard, holed wall, old car, plumbed leak, bodge-job, loft.

They are hard to touch.  My daughter said, “Yuck.” 

"Hard as stone," I lied. To spite me she hammered away a fragment with her thin blue slate. 

Inside it was pure white. No knowing its age. No tree rings. No knots. No pearls. No doings at all.

Is any growth or gathering of minerals possible here? Can a thing repel all other things? 

I think about the insubstantiality of a flow gathering things within in it. How some things are sticky and some are not. Some things stay open yet others always seem closed. Some traces are plainly obvious and others take a huge amount of time and attention before they can be brought into the open.

So many thoughts have been achieved during my current masters and very little has been shared. I'm still trying to break out of that hermit phase.

 

Exploding day-to-day climate relations

Theorectical Archaeology Group Conference, University of East Anglia (UAE) December 2023.

As usual, and also having become a little hermit-like online over the last year, I'm behind on posting this. But I really wanted to share this fascinating insight into contemporary archaeological enquiry into how objects and matters continually assemble and reassemble. With huge gratefulness to Historic England archaeologist Dr Katy Whittaker, who brought together our small group of artists and archaeologists to Climate TAG in December 2023, by open invitation, asking: 'How did we get here'. We each selected an object associated with our travel to the conference and over several online meetings and one in-real-life morning, picked them apart by exploring (destroyed, observed, discussed) their matter, connections and complexities (which were compound and several), and also got to know each other's perspectives a bit. A fabulous bonus!

Session abstract:

I think it's apt to describe the findings of this small quick project as becoming exponentially more complex as we explored. This contributed to an adaptable and precarious assemblage of things and responses that were overlapping and confusing. A hotch-potch within which some responses were overt and extrovert, and some were very subtle, while others celebrated these differences by weaving the experience together. 

Assemblages of assemblages

Grounding

Thinking about archaeological tropes.

Blue Rec - production images

Thought I would share some extra images from the Blue Rec commission. Here's other blog post about the commission with all the various links. Blue Rec blog post.

This image is from the extraction of the brick guard. 

The following pictures are from putting together the fabric that is on the reverse of the Blue Rec hangings. The images on the front side was from scanning the ground in the months after extraction. One of these is currently on the background of this blog.

The backing took a long time to make because I decided to dye the fabric with dye plants located near the excavation site which took a while. And was also quite complicated to do because all the shaped pockets had to be in exactly the right place, with a couple of holes wandering off to give an idea of the plastic board maybe eventually breaking up. I really enjoyed the process, not least because the fabric took on the aroma of the plant dyes and it was just really pleasurable to handle. 

It's probably the least visible part of the installation but is my favourite bit. Partly because it remains hidden. But mainly because I didn't rinse the dye out so it physically holds remnants of the woodland. By the time installation came around the fabric still carried a faint aroma of the plant dyes. I like the idea of these still being in conflict with the board, which although I was once adamant wouldn't be in the installation at all ended up casting shade from a corner as the work didn't work without it.