Diapsid (2018), sound and moving image installation, 9:31 [please listen with headphones]
Slightly to the south of the furthermost point of Hartland Peninsula on the North Devon coastline are the spectacularly folded and tilted cliffs at Hartland Quay. Like a series of great chevrons in a sequence of alternating shales and sandstones the ancient rocks appear inert, fixed in their materiality since turning to stone. Standing as the eroded roots of ever-changing, ancient mountains formed 300 million years ago as the supercontinents collided during unfathomable transformations taking place across deep geological timescales, the cliffs remain in flux –
from weathering that brings landslides and rock falls,
and from the sea’s erosion as it finds its way into cracks and crevices, surging and scouring undercuts, hollows and caves, forming jagged platforms, sea stacks and arches, parallel ridges and gullies and rounding pebbles and cobbles.
Diapsid is a meditation on the undersides and insides of Carboniferous rock into which a littoral zone sea cave has been undercut.
Composed from data collected during field trips, Diapsid explores the notion of hauntings in landscapes depleted by loss of diversity and threatened with cascading extinctions within the frame of ecological polycrisis.
Based on speculative knowledge of long-evolving organisms from the time when the layers of sediments that formed these rocks were laid down, Diapsid depicts a world conjured from concentrated distillations of sea cave interior. It questions how imagination can expand human sensing to approach different eras and temporalities, and how that can manifest and be shared through the installation.
