Sedimentary Text Exchange was an installation presented as part of group exhibition We Are Made Of Star Stuff, which was held in March 2022 at Hoxton 253 Project Space, and curated by Berta Zubrickaitė
I was invited to create an interactive and mutable installation to consider the exhibition’s main theme of deep geological time, and to lead a workshop for local people in the space.
You can read about the exhibition here
The installation comprised a tabletop ‘library’ of texts ruminating on the accretion and displacement of matter, inner & outer landscapes, deep time thinking and lived memory.
The concrete paperweights, could be touched and moved about on the table to access the texts. In return for depositing touch on these objects, the viewer could take a few sheets of paper to read, then pass on/keep/dispose of as they saw fit.
I wrote on instagram in the lead-up to the show:
Like eroding banks of sedimentary rock, as you deplete the piles of paper you’ll change the shape of the installation and redistribute its constituent matter.
You can keep it, pass it to a friend, make a sculpture, draw on it, burn it or recycle it. Mail it to your local MP. Use it as a coaster.
I’ve always found it awkward writing formally about my work. I actually completely hate it. But the things we write when we’re thinking about stuff is important to look back on. So, please don’t take anything on this website as stone cold truths. These things might have been true when I wrote them, so that’s the context you need. Everything is always changing! My ‘artist statement’ at the time was as follows:
Lydia is a multidisciplinary visual artist living in Essex. Her work is about Survival In Harsh Conditions, and revolves around geomorphological processes and through these, what we can learn about time, growth and resilience. Through text and objects, she makes new spaces which exist between the real and imaginary, making links between actions, landscapes, materials and feelings. She investigates the relationship between interior and exterior worlds; retelling and processing currents of tenderness and unease, utilising negative space and combinations of specific materials to interfere and rearrange. Her work is as much about what is not there as it is about what is there.
I also wrote this, in an email to the curator:
In my work there is a perpetual overlap between micro and macro, making a point to place the awe-inspiring alongside the banal and view them through the same lens. I’ve found writing to be the best vehicle for these considerations over the past year or so – the pandemic has forced new ways of working and a real stripping-back of my practice, as I’m sure it has with so many artists and creatives. I still view art-making and art-viewing to be essential tools in understanding our world, however I’m more conscious than ever around putting objects into the world, and find myself wanting to vary the ways in which I share my work with audiences. I’ve been involved with teaching for around five years now, both within Art, but also in outdoor learning, with groups of all ages. For me, it’s a way to enact and share my practice in a really tangible way directly with the people who can benefit from it the most.
The workshop element was a very simple sort of investigation into the relationship between collage and geology. The idea was to think geologically with paper. Cutting, layering, tearing, folding, bending, revealing and obscuring – all these things are concerned with the movement of materials. My teaching practice centres largely around allowing learners to build, dismantle and rearrange materials and imagery, therefore opening their thinking up to new possibilities. I really loved doing this workshop and was so pleased with the things people made.
After the show came down, I wrote this on instagram:
Think I learned a lot from this – it’s so funny how when you make stuff and you have ideas it seems like literally the Best Thing In The World™️, then when you look at it ‘finished’ you are like.. what is this???
I was very grateful to be given the opportunity by @bertazub to explore these ideas in what turned out to be (in my opinion) kinda a clumsy way. You are welcome to think what you like about this work – I know a lot of people had good things to say about it, and I definitely liked it, but for me it represents a very overengineered rough sketch or planogram for a grouping of ideas that perhaps weren’t all needed in the same place, or necessarily in this particular manifestation. And that is totally cool!
Project spaces like this are very important for giving artists opportunities to test stuff out and be *unpolished* and *unprofessional*
I threw a lot of refined and unrefined ideas at this, and I don’t hate it, I just now see all the things it wasn’t. That’s such a great thing and a privilege I have.
Trying not to turn this into a brain-spill.. but yeah – honesty is all I got bébé 😎!! Failure doesn’t exist!! Everything you make is important! Learn all the time!!
Have a great day love you