Traces
Through my research into geological time and the process of fossilisation, I learned of certain sites along the southern coast of Fife, which are known to contain fossiliferous rocks. There I conducted a series of fossil hunts where I discovered a variety of plant matter fragments from the Carboniferous period, 330 million years ago. Locked within the surfaces of these ancient stone are traces of life that is no longer in existence, links to an age long past in Earth’s history; a captured moment rendered permanent in stone, shadows from another world. By grinding the fossils down into a powder, I am undoing the millennia long petrification process; breaking down this permanence and transforming them into something more ephemeral, just as our understanding of the distant past shifts and changes, steeped in uncertainty.
Humanity has an innate need for understanding that drives our investigations, and through my experiments with delicate and ephemeral materials, contrasted with the physicality of my fossil finds, I am attempting to capture the space between knowing and being, where the physical world meets our interpretation of it. The resulting work explores the relationship between forms, and how their contrasting materiality charges the spaces they inhabit.
