Gathering Oddkin, Nirox Foundation winter sculpture fair – Good Neighbors

7may-31 August 2022

BRIGITTA STONE-JOHNSON SOUTH AFRICA

Gathering oddkin, 2022

Over the last two hundred years, humans have moved from beings that affect their immediate dwelling places to epoch-altering geo-writers. Since the industrial age, we have acted as if non-living things had neither life nor agency, imagining ourselves as independent of the living world despite our deep dependency upon it to sustain our lives. In this work, I respond to issues raised around surface, materiality, weathering, and decay as acts of kin-making with the more-than-human world. I make – Kin with stony matter through the site-specific installation of rubble, Tar, locally gathered stone, and plant matter. I explore themes of entangled life through acts of piling and weathering, troubling the boundary between the human and the ‘other than human matter. Making oddkin with the non-human requires that we find traces of stone in the human and measure the human in stone. It requires that we think and imagines the vitality of stony oddkin and terrain. As we become those who learn to ‘make-with, become with, compose with – The earthbound Donna Haraway (2016).’

The work is predominantly in Tar a material that entangles ancient fossil depositions with placemaking, at once reminding us of our dependence upon the physical world, even as we imagine it as a material for the erasure of vital landscapes. It blurs boundaries, pooling and merging ancient places and modes of modern meaning-making. As a modern material of road building, it connects the ancient past as fossil matter to the distant future. Tieing the pathways between sites of extraction, production, and ultimate future decay. As it decays and becomes rubble, it gathers traces of its past material entanglements, pebbles and stone, merged with global supply chains of industrialisation, and rubber and oil residue of its surfaces linger in sedimentary deposits in dams and rivers. It is ultimately becoming the marker of the passing of the age of the Anthropocene.

Gathering Oddkin, 2022