Limestone Interruptions – Anna Best Archive

An artist’s book, published UK, 2025. Signed edition of 200.

Available for £15 from LRB bookshop, Lala Books, Beaconsfield Gallery in London, Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam and Limestone Books in Maastricht.

The fact of a shared underlying limestone formation between Portland and the Dalmatian coast was of interest. A writing process characterised by interruptions. 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 are particles. Paragraphs are treated like fossils, literally sandwiched into the text of a C19th book about Geology.

Reviewed by Phil Smith (Mythogeography): ”This book by the artist Anna Best works in two distinct strata. One is a late nineteenth century account of the formation of the rocks of the UK; the second is a series of personal reflections from a residency in Split (Croatia).A remarkable quality of ‘Limestone Interruptions’ is how the two layers intersect with each other, so that the nineteenth century geologist’s description of how rocks form and slide and crush assumes great emotional and poetical force, while the accounts of the artist’s forays along the Dalmatian coast acquire an increasingly precarious and fragile nature, under pressure from the limestone landscape.
At any moment a cultural misunderstanding is liable to set off a landslide: “one of the other women calls to me – ‘This is a military zone. You must be careful’…. I see a man in blue camouflage walk slowly onto the jetty…. I feel sure he is looking at the camera in my hand”. More often, the precarity is an emotional and psychological one – sometimes under the pressure to “pretend to pretend you belong” – when “getting into water is like slipping into oneself, into aloneness, into time”, when body and rock fuse or become confused: “sand particles making and unmaking our face, the face of the land mass erodes”.
A switching between sea and dry land effects an ‘interzone’, magnified by the author’s awareness, through her nineteenth century expert of “formations….many thousands of feet in thickness” causing “intense pressures”. Climbing a hill, the incline enforces itself upon the author; climbing down, her own choices bring her to a dangerous edge. Rock become untrustworthy: “my feet searching for solid rock, then grasping a surface that shifts…. under my foot, it’s moving ominously. I am taking it slower, with care”.
With great skill, Anna Best holds us to her psycho-geological journey, passing through representations of the world in the world to a “serious body in space”, a steel Belvedere, that is seemingly always looming and in then, at the end, is right before us: “I walk towards it…. A tightrope walker between two geologies-plateaux. The journey between is tremulous. And tremendous.”

Reviewed by Horatio Morpurgo (A Guide to the Unconformity): “I liked the diaristic feel of the book, its immediacy, its feeling at a loss somewhere a long way away. The amphibious, watery theme and the author’s conversation with this Victorian text, or the way their experiences flow around, wash up against it, dissolve elements from it.
The oneiric first person and the professorial voices are talking to each other – not least across time – and I found both absorbing – but the reader is left to arrive at their own account of what this ‘conversation’ has been about. The strangeness of these surroundings and an alienation resulting? Or an alienation preceding? Are we at one life-stage progressing to the next? Or are we exploring rather the uncertainty of any ‘horizon’ now, the difficulty of relating any vivid, contingent experience to what might give it meaning?
The author keeps searching for paths and encountering bemused / bemusing strangers but past a certain point, though we haven’t left Split literally, we find ourselves on a path that feels ‘right’. But thereafter Portland starts to figure and there’s the discussion of oolite, some homeward turn – and with it a softening of the edges that felt jagged earlier in the piece.”

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, , Andrew Carey Triarchy Press, Spike Golding, Lulu Norman, Clare Stent, Ladies Art Group, Nick Berkeley, Graham Shackleton.