Water and Stone – CAST

Notes from CAST’s event Water and Stone:

Bashing Granite – David Paton

• stone in relation to cultural geography – exploring a different language to art
• everyday-ness being wrapped into our understanding of material
• rhythm of the quarry – mechanical and handmade
• the physical toll of quarrying – the changing of the body
• relationship of body to material
• the journey of the St Piran sculpture – very traditional method, pilgrimage
• slow pace of working with granite
• ‘travelling over the surface’
• the importance of the installation process
• the positives and negatives of quarries – buildings are the positives of the negative voids of the quarry
• ‘the breath of the geologic’ – when a stitch split is completed
• commission for Penlee lifeboat disaster **
• Making the Geologic Now **

Dynamic Planet, Dynamic Granite – Beth Simons

• granite=quartz, alkali feldspar and plagioclase feldspar
• tourmaline – more unique to Cornwall’s granite
• granites made in many settings – continental collision and post-orogenic uplift/collapse is Cornish, 305 mya
• a lot of varied granites in SW England – two-mica, muscovite, biotite, tourmaline, topaz
• the aesthetics of geology
• dartmoor unusually large granite bodies
• globular quartz variant – like tree rings
• rock=untouched by human, stone=worked by human
• Megiliggar rocks (tremearne cliff) – https://variscancoast.co.uk/megiliggar-rocks
• variscancoast.co.uk – maps etc of granite
• china clay is degraded (topaz) granite
• different lichens on different granites
• The Living Stones

Characterising an Historic Town – Nick Collins

• what makes a place ‘nice’?
• designation of conservation areas
• ‘opeways’ – medieval pathways
• rusticated, granite, ashlar, killas, elvan, slate, quoins, key stones, stucco, slate hanging, wet laid slate, tile caps, kennels and conduits
• geographical, topographical, and a convergence of many cross-county roads
• stannary town – regulating tin mining
• ‘blind windows’
• vistas
• rural feel to lanes with no pavements
• ‘rubble stone’ often on back of houses as cheaper than facade materials
• width of street potentially due to market
• greenery beyond hard stone of the town’s buildings
• the coherency of a place
• talk appeals/tailored to the local audience
• interesting local politics

See how you go – Richard Wentworth

• a generalist
• demography
• we’re a short incident in the history of a town
• ‘a culture of kitchen top-ery’
• ‘who gave the cars planning permission?’
• we live in a world of surfaces
• while you’re looking you’re wandering
• made, wrought or cast
• ‘we have to accept the roly poly of being alive’
• posters/pictures of demolition
• memorials on roundabouts – what do they mean?
• skeuomorphs
• fakes of fakes
• ‘you can feel the deep, deep politics’
• ‘process is incredibly interesting and we’re all in it’
• ‘we all have a political headache’

The format of having four different speakers from entirely different backgrounds talk in succession like this was fascinating. It approached the investigation into Helston’s heritage from multiple directions, all then assembling to give a fuller picture than each one alone would have done. It created an environment of cross-pollination, not only in terms of the speakers but also in terms of the audience – someone who would ordinarily maybe gravitate towards artist talks (i.e. me) got to hear a scientist and an architectural conservation expert speaks on their specialisms, something I would have been unlikely to do otherwise. The architectural conservation expert’s talk (Nick Collins) sat in a strange in-between category that I personally had not learnt about before. Whereas in the binary subject matter categories I understood David, Beth and Richard to sit nicely in either art or science, Nick’s talk, assessing the ‘feel’ of Helston, fell strangely inbetween a very pragmatic, bureaucratic, corporate assessment of a place and a slow, sensitive, historical inquiry – an exercise in the art of looking. This is definitely something to consider going forwards in not only my studio practice but also my dissertation – bringing together sources from a wide range of backgrounds and letting them interact with one another, sparking unexpected connections and dialogues.