Groundwork Gallery 'Extraction' Residency 2024.
Over the summer of 2024 I was thrilled to take part in the fourth 'Extraction' residency programme with The Groundwork Gallery in King's Lynn as an 'Associate Artist'. As with previous years the artists were invited to explore ideas and issues related to extraction and extractivism, with a specific focus on the concept of 'Ground up'. Over 20 UK and international artists took part and the first of two exhibitions associated with the residency programme is running at Groundwork Gallery, King's Lynn, from 12th October to 14 December 2024, see EXHIBITIONS page for further details. A second exhibition will be held in March to June 2025.
The residency Networking Week in July was a wonderful and packed itinerary of site visits, talks, workshops and activities. This included an insightful and information-packed day with geologist Tim Holt Wilson in West Norfolk, a fabulous behind the scenes tour of the Sedgwick Earth Sciences Museum in Cambridge with Liz Hide, flint knapping with master knapper John Lord, a tour of Wild Ken Hill and the beaver enclosure with Harry Buscall, to name just a few of the many highlights. The week was finished off with some inspiring and engaging art workshops on Holme beach with some of last year’s resident artists.
Prior to the residency I had undertaken some personal research into the Neolithic flint mining at Grimes Graves and other later flint mining sites in Breckland, including handling some of the Grimes Graves archive at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge. The residency allowed me to revisit this creative research and put it into the wider context of 'Extraction'. A serendipitous visit to Grimes Graves, just after a small collapse in one of the galleries, meant that I was offered some chalk blocks and rubble from the Neolithic mines. This allowed me to respond to the materiality of the mines, to the chalk itself, alongside the celebrated black flint of the Floorstone. The residency and subsequent creative meanders led me to create two installations, 'From deep time to the strike of a flint' and 'To dwell on Chalk'. for the 'Ground Up' Exhibition,
'From deep time to the strike of a flint'
Ever since the application process for the 'Ground Up' residency ideas relating to flint mines, and the deep flint layers and fossils within them, had been entering my creative thoughts. The wonderful tour round the adjoining Sedgwick Earth Sciences Museum with Liz Hide on the residency threw some of these ideas into sharper relief. The wall-to-wall cabinets of stone samples in the Alfred Watson collection - a fascinating Victorian and Edwardian era collection of building stone from Britain and its colonies - and the wondrous display cases of fossils and geological specimens in the main halls told stories of geological time and origin, but also of the history, politics and aesthetics of collection, study and display. The stone samples and fossils acted as signifiers of both geological and social time. Examination of the exceptional Castle Rising church with Tim Holt Wilson on the residency again showed how one façade, or even one block of stone, can reveal the multiple temporalities of geological formation, phases of extraction and re-use of historic material, but also the social statements of architecture and status. These ideas led me to thinking about how extraction sites and the subsequent use of this material, with particular reference to the Neolithic and later flint mining in the Grimes Graves environs, embody many interconnecting layers of time and significance.
Using flint fossils and ‘casts’ as my inspiration I carved into chalk blocks using flint tools, created on the residency with John Lord and Will Lord, to create mine shaft and pit-like hollows. Through the pouring in of liquid clay slip I created casts of both the physical act of extraction and a moment in time and intention. Through a continued process of carving, all that remained of previous extractive event was the ceramic cast – a fossil of sorts. The prehistoric and later gun flint mines, often viewed as a homogeneous ‘sites’, all represent many sliding and interconnecting layers of time, understanding, endeavour and personal experience. From the long durée of geological ‘deep time’ and of prehistoric understandings of ancestral or mythological origins of this ‘special’ material buried deep within the ground. Represented also were the generational and familial relationships inherent in mining landscapes and ways of working being passed down. Also, the episodic and seasonal rhythms of particular groups or individuals returning to these mines and pits. Down to the measuring of a working day down a gun flint mine by the time a candle took to burn or a split-second moment, like striking a flint or thumbprint left on an antler pick. My installation attempts to represent some of the many shifting and overlapping timescales that we encounter within the archaeological record.
Flint fossils, so common in the chalk strata of the mines, whether viewed through a scientific lens, their mythological or folklore associations or just pure aesthetics, are such special objects of wonder and awe. Evidence at many Neolithic sites, including flint mines, suggests that they may have held significance and meaning, just as they have continued to do to the present day. It was enjoyable to create delicate ceramic slipcasts of sea urchins shells and to carve 'fossils' out of the Grimes Graves chalk for the installation.
Grimes Graves represents maybe 20 generations of working & passing on of skills. This familial pattern is also clear in the later mining tradition, which saw nearby Brandon became the capital of the worldwide post medieval gun flint trade. Mining and knapping continued using technology not much advanced, bar the use of the metal tools, but on a much industrialised scale. It ran in the blood, and lungs, of many generations of local families and its importance can still be traced in the architecture, landscape and social history of the area. The installation includes a knapping core & gun flint waste found within the grounds of Flint Hall - bought in the 1790s by a flint master who built knapping sheds and workers cottages - was inscribed with the names of Brandon gun flint families.
The mines and shallower flint pits at Grimes Graves represent innumerable episodes of extraction and visits to the site over 400 years. Excavation of deep galleried shafts would have been months of work for a large group, however some connections with the site were on a much reduced, more individual scale. Analysis of individual antler picks within a linear group of a shallower flint workings revealed that a several were shed by a single stag on different years. Wonderfully suggestive of a small group of people with a relationship with a particular herd, or indeed individual stag, returning to the same group of pits seasonally over a number of years. Perhaps returning to the site each year as the ground warmed and the deer have shed their antlers in the late spring and early summer.
I'm entranced by the 4,500 year old finger prints preserved on antler picks from Grimes Graves; an intimate connection with a person and a moment in time. The striking of a hammer stone to create a flint flake or rework a tool offers the same connection with hands working; a split second action, Some moments are more intentional, representing deliberate acts of connection, ceremony and remembering. A ceramic cast of a rammed chalk bowl, preserving this transitory and fragile 'artefact', along with my fingerprints, references the decorated Grooved Ware pottery bowls placed on a chalk platform or 'altars' within the mines. These, like the many offerings and special objects brought to the site would already have stories and histories, associations with other people, places and times.
'To dwell on chalk'
Another direction that the residency led me in was to consider the ecological impact of flint extraction; in particular how the landscape of the Neolithic mines at Grimes Graves have developed into a protected habitat of rare chalk flora. The title of the piece is derived from the latin meaning of ‘calcicole’ (‘to dwell on chalk’), plants which thrive in chalky soils, as opposed to ‘calcifuge’ (‘to flee from chalk’) plants which need acidic soils. The Breckland landscape was subject to significant periglacial freeze and thaw events, which deposited acid, sandy soils, shifting dune systems and the characteristic patterned and striped ground visible as vegetation marks of differing plant species. The Neolithic mine shaft excavations brought vast quantities of chalk up to the surface and overtime has caused the acidic loving plants ‘to flee from the chalk’ to create a rare habitat of sheltered chalk downland, set amongst the surrounding acidic grasslands and heaths. The abundant and unusual flora, along with the protected bat species living within the mines, are designated as a ‘Site of Scientific Interest’ (SSSi). Grimes Graves has been described as first 'landscape of contamination' due to industry affecting the ecology so drastically. Although it must be acknowledged that there has been millennia of human activity at this site that have played a role in its current biodiversity, including the vast midden deposits associated Bronze Age settlement and grazing of animals. Not least the large scale excavations themselves, removing some of the windblown sand deposits and the ongoing stewardship and intervention of the site as a protected and much visited archaeological site, with frequent tree and scrub removal. It is interesting to ponder on whether the vast areas of later flint mines, in particular those associated with the post medieval gun flint industry, many of which lie preserved within the forestry plantations of Breckland, offer a similar potential given the right conditions and stewardship. The description of the large flint mining area at Lingheath when it was requisitioned for farming in the 1940s stated it was 'a wilderness of stones, chalk, trees and moss' is particularly evocative, as are the historic photographs of the mines in the last years of their working in the 1930s.
Artistically these ideas of sand and chalk, acid and alkali, this led me to play with chemical reactions on chalk and clay surfaces. These pieces explore the dichomoty of contamination and ‘fleeing from chalk’, whilst creating something beautiful and valued through using the chemical reaction of alkali and acid on both chalk and ceramic slip. Inspired initially by the dendritic tendril patterns of iron and manganese staining on a flint knapping flake. I explored ‘Mochaware’ techniques - developed in the late eighteenth century used an acidic solution, originally derived from tobacco - with oxides and stains to creep and etch into an alkali liquid slip producing delicate dendritic tendrils and circles, which look remarkably similar to the Grimes Graves contour plan of the earthworks. Through applying the same acidic solutions and stains to chalk from the Grimes Graves mines, where the calcium carbonate reacts with acid and some of the surface is lost and a small amount of carbon dioxide is produced, creating a delicate lichen-like surface within the eroded chalk. Flint knapping waste from the residency was then decorated with the common names of the rare chalk loving plants that thrive on the ground above the mines. These pieces are displayed on a mound of flint and chalk and artefacts inspired by creative research into the site, referencing the flint and chalk altars and platforms created within the mines.
