Installation and Private View – Salisbury Arts Centre

The final hang last week at Salisbury Arts Centre took just 3 days, which was quite a feat!  Curated by Amanda Wallwork and me, and set up with the help of many other step in stone artists and a team at Salisbury Arts Centre, including Visual Arts Manager Louise.    As part of the installation , Tessa Farmer has re-created a miniature environment in the entrance display case of her skeletal fairies and other creatures interacting and emerging from fossils, some on loan from Somerset Earth Science Centre.  Ralph Hoyte has also re-created his GPS-triggered soundscape ‘ANTICLINE’ to listen to via smartphones around the grounds of the centre.  This can be downloaded via this link.   The artwork includes a selection of indoor and outdoor pieces from our 6 venues last year.

We had our Private Vew on Friday evening (19th Aug).  It was lovely to have so many of the artists together again, many who haven’t seen each other since last year’s project.  Numerous visitors came, expressing their interest and enthusiasm for the subject, our work and the exhibition as a whole.  “An intriguing multi-media, sophisticated exhibition!” We are pleased with the information/artist panels, which really help to tell the story.

Below are some images from our installation and Private View.  Do come and visit the exhibition (runs ’til 24 Sept)!

Fiona Campbell  22/8/16

Goodbye Fairy Cave Quarry

Spent a day in the Fairy Cave Quarry last Friday, looking after the show, and was rewarded with fantastic light shows. Here are some photos to whet your appetite – last chance to see this treasure of a place this weekend.

Rowena’s rocks – spot the difference?

Amanda’s colour chart – don’t miss it as you come in

Sun coming through

Who painted this picture?

What’s this doing here?

A Fairy Campsite?

What a day it’s been!

This has been part of my life for most of this year – Goodbye, Fairy Cave Quarry

Bron Bradshaw  16/10/15

GREAT HOVERING ROCKS!

UPDATE before the Bank Holiday (!)

ANTICLINE: GPS-triggered soundscape for Westdown Quarry (now running). This work can be downloaded free from my website (all instructions for downloading and use are HERE!)

SYNCLINE: array of 6 autonomous megaphones beaming audio content into The Amphitheatre at Fairy Cave Quarry (work-in-progress)

PERICLINE: sonic audio-art gallery piece for the Black Swan, Frome: this is the third piece in the triptych of audioworks for Step in Stone; it’s now in its final stages:

Very many thanks to great guy Charles Clapham, Workshop Supervisor for the School of Earth Sciences, Bristol University. I rang him up out of the blue with my strange artistic request to create rock core samples out of the Fairy Cave Quarry rock so I could animate them and he said, “bring’em in!” “When?”, I asked. “Now,” he said. Two weeks later he rang me up – he’d made two 25mm cores out of the rock. Thanks to Bristol Uni!

[Ralph Hoyte working with Phill Phelps]

Sally Kidall setting up: Lest We Forget: is enough enough?

Stage 2 openings today at Westdown Quarry and its a glorious day! Come down today and check out my grass growing chairs in “Lest We Forget: is enough enough?”
Materials: wheat grass, soil, timber chairs, plastic, water, rocks, glass-fibre rods, string

First image of finished work last night, light was fading, rain easing, better images to following.

What an enormous week organising my first work for ‘step in stone’ at Westdown Quarry, sourcing 12 old chairs, the right soils, tools & materials, planting seeds with in an hour of arriving from Australia after traveling for 36 hours!! It was a relief to find my bags were going to fit my motley collection of old chairs sourced from Northwich, Cheshire, Bristol.

Sarah McCluskey, my very good friend from art school days, kept me going through the jet-lag with her endless wit and hard labour!! Here she is, totally soaked, filling my plastic pyramids with puddle water, yes we had online water supply yesterday, thank you rain!

Sarah loading rocks into the base of the chairs to anchor them to site. And thanks to her husband Steve Woodcock too for helping me the other night attach the chair bases.

Here shows how the well traveled grass cushions, that have been in & out of my van all week, sit on the seats with more soil below to nourish them over the next few weeks. The plastic bags are them supported with fine glass fibre rods.

To find my work you need to keep walking, its about 15-20 minute walk from the entrance gates, keep following the path along the river, don’t give up its worth the walk to this beautiful enchanting site!

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Sally Kidall  15/8/15

The Age of Stone

Getting stuck in to two large pieces for the fist installation of step in stone at the Somerset  Earth Science Centre at Moon’s Hill Quarry at the end of the month.

The first of which is a piece I call “The Age of Stone” after Rodin’s “The Age of Bronze”.

I don’t see what I do as being contemporary art. It’s conception is far to connected to the hunter-gatherer experience, seeing movement in stone and seeking to animate, and too closely involved in re-imagining classical sculpture to want to be tied down to post Duchamp perspectives.

However there are times when the contemporary perspective really ties in to the conversation I am having through my practice.  With “The Age of Stone” I am really wanting to highlight  geological timescale and the extraordinary perspective that the understanding of deep time has on our experience of the world.  I find that in an era of fundamentalism I am using the fundament to talk about my fundamentals. The fundamental in this case being that if we look and really examine the world around us it reveals to us it’s history in an intricate and entirely cohesive way. We can see that these limestone rocks that we walk on every day were formed from the bodies of sea creatures. Because the Calcium in bones and shells is in fact a metal, we can examine the magnetic signatures created as the rocks were formed that reveal their location at that time within the earth’s magnetic field, we can date their formation from the organic chemistry within  the life that became rock.  We find that we can build up a picture from the bedrock, from the fundament that dwarfs the biblical story in every respect. Every rock. every stone on the planet is interconnected in this same story, of a planet that created this life from itself.

What a great opportunity step of stone  has given me to exhibit “The Age of Stone” in the context of Moon’s Hill Quarry and the Somerset Earth Science Centre.

Duncan Elliott  1/6/15

Investigating Fairy Cave Quarry – 21st May 2015

Spent the last two hours of daylight exploring and collecting in Fairy Cave quarry. The echo of crow calls and the sun’s shadow crawling up the quarry walls.

 

Duncan Cameron  21/5/15

Suzie’s trial pieces

“Finds” Suspended on Wool Cords

Tying two heritages together from the Westdown /Ashdown Wood Quarry area.   The artefacts have all been found rusting away during walks in the area of the former quarry – relics of its past history. They are held on wool cords to depict a second element of the areas past and present history and heritage – sheep.

Alice and Jacob Sunbathing!

Two fleeces washed and drying out in the sun before carding. More to go!

Fairy Cave – A fairy ring of stones at Fairy Cave Quarry

Trialing out the possibility of a large felt “ball” to be held within ring of stones which are already in situ at Fairy Cave. The finished piece will not be red or plastic!!

Large Stones

Photographs of possible large stone in the Westdown Quarry area – which large stone might be the best to felt around?

Blue Tit

Nature getting its own back – blue tit stealing the felted wool back off the rock!

Trial felted rock pieces

Suzie Gutteridge  13/5/15