Geohaptics: In Touch with Morley Quarry (2023)

REFLECTIONS
Stepping inside Morley Quarry, a place whose history was unearthed through excavation, histories are excavated in yourself. The rocks here are amongst the oldest in England and stepping amongst them seems to mute the surface, soil-level politics. The human as the primary narrator seems to dissolve in the presence of this ancestral, elder material. “Rock” is often a metanonym for something hard, rigid, immovable and unchanging but Morley is a residue, a reminder of the heaving, oozing dynamic under-earth that has shaped and continues to shape the Earth. Crumpling, crushing, tilting, tearing, squashing and folding into the shapes, these extraordinary geologic bodies are sculpted and patterned by a haptic choreography ultra-imperceptible to the human gaze. We speak of deep time but these are not monuments to the past, but present monuments to movement. In the process - we are moved, we are touched. Our earthly minerals are stirred, called, brought into dialogue.  

Within this piece of opened-up landscape, we are opened up. 

RESEARCH

The verbs associated with the shaping of these huge mineralogic bodies - crumple, crush, tilt, tear, squash and fold feel tactile. Suddenly these huge, ancient, organic matters, previously out of touch - feel within reach, feel relatable, feel like a relation. Perhaps, in a time where many of us need to rebuild our broken relationship with a broken earth,  touching and feeling might offer one strategy for dissolving the boundaries that might be estranging ‘rock’ bodies from ‘human’ bodies. Perhaps it will invite us to engage with a different type of relationship with our ecology and help us recognise or come into closer contact with “more-than-human forces” (Shouhei, 2023). Writer and poet Erin Robinsong offers “geohaptics” as a word to capture the intimacy we might feel when we are invited to think of our human bodies as the matters we will eventually become (earth, water, mineral). This could be described as a form of “sensuous geography” (Rodaway and Serres, 2008) where the planet becomes a “sensate archive whose histories, materialities, and vitalities are made legible through touch.”

RESPONSE

“Geohaptics: In Touch with Morley Quarry”

In response to these ideas and in the company of this extraordinary site I have generated three moving image gestures, or ‘rough cuts’, pun very much intended, contemplating the movement inherent in the ongoing shaping of this site and the intimate contact invoked between these rock bodies and my own. Paper photography became a way of playing with these dynamic verbs; coming into contact with these ancient rocks at a distance and performing with the material.  The seemingly inert rocks of the site and the paper are suddenly reanimated through my bodily and sensorial engagement with it.  They are an invitation to recognise the geologic in yourself and think about how we might want to be in relation to the ancient, ancestral matters of the British Isles.

This work was created in response to an invitation from RADAR Loughborough Arts and will be exhibited to the public in Charnwood Geo Forest Park in January 2024.