an earshare / to cassay the earthcrust
Each pebble found on the shingle of Orford Ness is matter, something that could absorb and conceal impact, each an untapped archive of the geological past and the Ness’s military histories. With this interpretation, artist Rachel Pimm has created new visual and sound works by taking the environment as a point of departure for further exploration; expanding on found historical traces and referencing the contradictory behaviour of particle physics in the field of quantum mechanics.
As the buildings on the Ness rewild, the nature reserve green-washes the military past. Salty deposits escape concrete surfaces, static buildings cry and sweat. Trauma manifests through rock and concrete.
To expand on this work, Pimm invited Graham Cunnington, a founder member of the industrial music collective Test Dept, to compose an antimatter soundtrack of granular sounds of the environment, featuring a quantum pebble that is both instrument and transmission, object and a wavelength.
hagstone
Rachel Pimm
an earshare / to cassay the earth crust part 1
This film is best experienced with headphones on. You can also watch this film on Vimeo or YouTube.
Rachel Pimm and Graham Cunnington
thunderclap
Rachel Pimm
etym
Rachel Pimm
an earshare / to cassay the earth crust part 2
This film is best experienced with headphones on. You can also watch this film on Vimeo or YouTube.
Graham Cunnington and Rachel Pimm
a backscatter reverberation
A pebble skitters across the floor of a deserted concrete armoury in a post-anthropocene landscape, fragmenting; creating and dispersing new particles of atom and stone. An explosive reverberation field oscillating through time. Stone as witness to the extensive human capacity for creation and destruction, the ability to simultaneously appreciate the transcendental beauty of things while imagining the means to create the destruction of everything. Observing extraordinary experiments of weapon testing through extreme vibration, battering ram force and vertical drop to insure maximum death resolution. The trauma scars of impact on hard target and pebble crater. The paranoid ear, cobra mist, backscattering over-the-horizon, searching for signs of war murmurs, potential danger and sudden attack. Planning for devastation to protect against annihilation while creeping toward ruination. The legacy spreads, resounding in distant lands. Nature bears witness to the lingering resonances in this uncanny place. Elemental minerals escape from concrete incarceration to return once more to shell and bone and earth and stone; as the sea laps at the shore, edging up the pebble-strata and gradually encroaching the Ness.
Graham Cunnington
cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine
Rachel Pimm
clast and blast / bone and stone
Bone travels across arthritic bone; rubbing, scraping; resistance; a river of minute fragments as pebbles in a field of stones, moving against each other over time. Particles forming and deforming, crystal deposits from the river flow of calcium and phosphorous in the blood. Motes of bone from abrasion, detrition. Friction forms new matter on the cortical. Calcite seeps out like the calthemite formed from escaping deposits; as flowstone on the hard target or as stalactites and stalagmites in the empty buildings of the Ness. The inside surfaces of the joint, no longer smooth lubricated bone; now grinding together creating contusions and lacerations, forming hard lumps, sharp points and grooves, like a pebble that has broken and reformed. War scars from a conflict suspended. Osteoclasts breakdown and reabsorb existing bone. Osteoblasts create bone anew. Clast means break. Blast means growth. Clast and Blast. A process of attrition and renewal, of destruction and regrowth.
Graham Cunnington
calthemite points the finger
Rachel Pimm