Now Stone Landscape

The Now Stone Landscape project employs an evolving wall-based text that has been re-configured across five public venues between June 2016 and August 2017. The work visualises and articulates a gathering of materials and a repeated movement towards disappearance. It was constructed on-site, before being destroyed and re-formulated for each of the following exhibitions:

‘The three stories are flattened’ [Void, Derry, Northern Ireland]
‘Stories In Your Mind’ [Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany]
‘Elizabeth Price Curates: In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive And You Were Full Of Joy’ [Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea with Hayward Touring]

The content of this slowly unfolding, hand-written text, presents the portrait of a character, that develops into a landscape. This character is a gravedigger who is in the process of burrowing down and into his concerns about mortality. This narrative and its construction enables an extended speculation on landscape as a gradually compressing series of lines and a compilation of contemporary materials that will eventually form a layer of stone underground, which may in turn be available to construct the buildings of the future. Here concerns are raised about the levels of artificiality in present-day objects and how these materials might compromise the integrity of future stone. Visually, the repetition and rapid disappearance of the same text across the wall, presents a gradual descent towards oblivion. The themes of permanence and degeneration are worked into and through the material choices that have included pencil, ephemeral chalk snap lines and permanent marker pens. The work does not exist beyond the exhibition space.

• https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/about/...