An artist’s book, published 2025 in an edition of 200. Travelling between two places, I was enchanted by the fact of a shared underlying limestone formation between Portland and the Dalmatian coast. Started in 2017 the process has been characterised by interruptions. My writing traces the contours of an internal anxiety which is tidal, intermittent and intense. The geography is Split’s Marjan Park-Forest, a promontory of the spectacular Karst landscape.
The writing is visual, fragmentary and chopped up. Lines of text are like layers in the strata of sedimentary rock, sentences as conglomerates of words, letters the grains. Paragraphs are treated like fossils, literally sandwiched into the text of AC Ramsay’s C19th book about Geology.
Limestone WALKING
INTERRUPTIONS form this work, time’s flow severed repeatedly.
Limestone FINDING – detours / Obilazak.
FILMING – focus, blur, long sight / short sight, degeneration of vision.
limestone OOLITIC – GLASS – as corporate capitalism takes hold through grabbing so rudely the private parts of the society/city/culture/place/person, and regards only improvements to the self.
Limestone THE BEACH – THE CITY – cheap flights perform an affiction not unlike the plague
Limestone PERILOUS / POROUS
Lime DISSOLVE stone
Limestone WATER – SEA
Limestone TIME – LATENESS
Limestone SPACE – GETTING LOST
Limestone SPLIT – into parts or elements – SPLIT in two, bifurcate, go in different directions, diverge, branch.
Aknowledgements
The Association KURS Marko Marulić Writers in Residence Programme, Split 2017; the British Council and Arts Council England Artists’ International Development Fund 2018 – for making the related film Plastic Water Stone.; Galerija Umjetnina; friends and colleagues in Croatia and the UK: Abigail Robinson, Neli Ruzic, Dan Oki, Sandra Sterle, Maja Vrankic, Branko Franceschi, Neil Chapman, Spike Golding, Lulu Norman, Clare Stent, Ladies Art Group, Nick Berkeley, Graham Shackleton.
Archive
2019 Notes of an Urban Pedestrian, Mecklenburgh Square Art, London, curated Clare Stent: Reading event.
Andrew Crombie Ramsay; The Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain, 5th & 6th editions, 1878.
- Reading AC Ramsay was a patchy experience. His writing ranges from extremely repetitious, very long sentences – like the lull of wheels on rails of a train journey – to sometimes really brilliant lyrical clarity. I had made the decision to bury or hide my writing inside his writing, and to appropriate his words. I set out to copy and paste his writing from found online facsimile PDFs. The practicalities of copying and pasting from PDFs without decent software produced an unexpected and labyrinthine task – individual letters were suddenly formatted insanely one by one, spacing between letters and words had gone awry, whole lines of text were fragmented and broken. It was if by applying ‘paste’ into a new digital format I was causing a geological upheaval to the text. During the process of re-constituting letters, words and lines to make sense I sometimes felt the need to make small edits to his text. I am inconsistent, as was he, and especially with my attempt to represent, faithfully or not, his eccentric punctuation and use of capitalisation. I had stayed with him through most of the 5th edition and then to my horror came across a revised and almost totally re-written 6th edition. I have used his writing from both sources and I have adapted his writing when I felt it necessary for the sake of narrative flow. The original idea of sandwiching my writing into his ‘strata’ has been chiselled into now. I had thought of my words being embedded and hidden like fossils, but in the final form they are fully exposed in the cliff face, revealed by the passing of time.