Having previously written about my rock enthusiasm (Erratic Behaviour, August 19th) I am now working on a new publication which blends together artistic research and photography. I was amused to find there is a type of rock called ‘chert’ which seemed like a made-up name, something I have been doing myself, with names like ‘dedge’ and ’tilted’.
I have found there are many specimens of cherts in museum collections, and taken one of them as the focus for my research. This has two parts:
- I write about the rock, with no further research, i.e. just what I know from memory
- I write about the rock, researching further details I consider important
And there’s a third section, in which I publish specimens from my own rock collection, which have largely evaded categorisation…
In the summer, I visited Fogo Island, where I offered a rock classification service and spent time at the Museum of the Flat Earth as a Visiting Artist.
Alongside these activities I also visited a number of museums on the island. For a small place, Fogo has quite a few of these dotted around the island. I was drawn particularly to the historic houses, such as the Bleak House Museum (pictured above). They provoke feelings of nostalgia through their decoration schemes and objects, but also a feeling of anxiety that the local culture contained in them is on the point of disappearing.
The museums are curious in that they are quite different to anything I have encountered elsewhere. They are not carefully curated as per the best practice of local or regional government, and perhaps this is a form of unconscious resistance to such normalisation. Over the past 150 years, most large museums have changed greatly, and this is why those that have changed less (such as Pitt-Rivers) are so compelling. They are the past, the closest we will get to time-travel, to escaping a world of instant information which can be so dissatisfying.
