Artwork Listing

Earthscape Cosmography is a collection of objects and materials suggesting activities of foraging and sheltering, hearth-making and play, that reach across timescales.

The starting point for the piece was my interest in Tim Ingold’s idea of the ‘taskscape’. Tim Ingold is an anthropologist whose writing has influenced a lot of artists and archaeologists. He described a way of seeing the natural landscape not as an empty place or a place of serene aesthetic contemplation, but as the site where humans (and animals) have always carried out the tasks of living, such as hunting, foraging, cooking and making tools.

After reading some of Ingold’s ideas, I saw an artefact in The Corinium Museum in Cirencester – a carved antler that would have been used for mining, and I liked about the fact it was a readymade tool. You could imagine a neolithic person finding it on a bed of moss in the woods and it being pretty much good to go.  I made my own version of the pick in porcelain, but my version has a hand-print grip impressed into it, underlining that invitation to use it as a tool.