I am writing from Cornwall, where I arrived on Friday after a 15 hour drive amidst bank holiday traffic with slices of offcuts from the corrennie sphere in the back of the car. This is a journey I have now completed a number of times and especially when travelling alone it reminds you just how diverse the landscape in the UK is and how much of the character of a region is defined by the geology- the bones of the land.
The following day I attended a small artist led seminar where Cornwall based artist/researcher David Paton gave a presentation of an aspect of his current research which draws on his experience as a stone sculptor and orbits a small granite quarry in Cornwall, which I had visited a number of years back and collected some speckly Cornish granite from. This quarry is fascinating in that the quarry and workshop are adjacent to each other and the owner of both, as I understand it, will not work with any imported stone.
I was amused to find David Paton was considering 'sludge' a material produced from the quarrying and granite manufacturing process, and one which had also caught my attention thoughout this project.
Working with granite in many ways basically seems to involve trying to crushing bits of it; pulverising the crystals with various tools, and what David calls the 'sludge' is the waste dust mixed with water often from the power saws which require a constant stream of water to keep the diamond cutting blades cool.
At Fyfe Glenrock a massive amount of water is used in this process and for both cost and environmental reasons the yard has its own water recycling plant which gathers all the dust infused water and through various mechanical processes with the help of gravity separates the two again. The sludge particles are dropped onto an ever changing mountain made up of particles of stone from quarries all over the world; Brazil, India, China, Norway, and of course Scotland, to name but a few. Terra Internationale.
This I was informed, eventually is mixed with other stone offcuts of multiple provenance, and used as by construction contractors as roadfill, perhaps on the very roads which will enable more stone to be delivered to the yard.
I just received an email with a beautiful drawing of the exact location for the three petrospheres. The day before I left John Bruce an Aberdeenshire Council engineer and I went to the site in Oldmeldrum town centre, (where there is quite a bit of building work going on as you can see above), with distinctly low fi templates of the 3 spheres, and following a good deal of consideration, humming and hawing...mostly from me, decided upon this exact layout which will instruct the building contractors exactly where to place the underground steel supports for the artwork.
