Sculpture-as-ethnography

In this talk, David Paton will focus on his recent doctoral project in Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry, where practices of granite-working offered an investigative mode of place-based research.

Through the lens of cultural geography, David argued for an expanded field of sculptural practice that focussed on durationally rich engagements with matter. Although concerned more with process than object making, ‘sculpture-as-ethnography’ articulates heightened forms of more-than-human relatedness when attention is honed to the tooling of the granite.

Craft is understood here as a doing word, a social knowledge in-practice. Making with granite became a means to story the quarry and its people.

Using film and performance, he will explore how creativity can be mobilised throughout multiple iterations of labour — making-a-living as quarry-worker, artist, researcher, geographer, artisan.

The rhythm of skill, the mistakes, the fatigue and material faults that exemplify quarry-work are examined, through David’s multi-moded practice, in terms of a creative friction generated by extraordinary situations and mundane actions. David A Paton is a visual artist with a specialism in stone working. Alongside public and private commissions sited nationally, he has been awarded a number of Arts Council England grants for artist-led projects.

Projects he is currently developing include Quarry on the Prom--a two week granite-working event in Penzance--and a residency at the National Trust's Godolphin House in Cornwall.

The 2015/16 Art History and Visual Culture research seminar series, chaired by João Florêncio under the theme of “Ecopoetics,” brings together speakers from a wide variety of disciplines – from art history and visual culture to theatre and performance, geography, law, and sociology – to explore the ways in which the realm of the visual intersects with ecological debates, thus reflecting on what it might mean to build an oikos, a home or dwelling place, predicated on more ethical modes of engagement and cohabitation with the human and nonhuman other.

All are welcome to this public event.

Free; no booking required.

Contact Details:
j.florencio@gold.ac.uk