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Boyd, Jean 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9343-6692
(2023)
The Harker Stacks (as part of Conversations in the Sedgwick, with Rona Lee and Louise K. Wilson).
In: 2023 GMHC-T2M Annual Conference: Mobilities, Aesthetics and Ethics, 25th - 28th October 2023, Konkuk University, Seoul; and Lancaster University (online).
(Unpublished)
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Other (Rocky Futures: Conversations in the Sedgwick)
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Abstract
Conversations in the Sedgwick Rona Lee _ Jean Boyd_ Louise K Wilson We propose the archive and store of the Sedgwick Geological Museum as our rocky environment. Designed by Cowper Griffith Architects and opened in 2019, it houses the collection and archive of the Sedgwick Museum; inaugurated in 1904 and founded on the collection of Dr John Woodward, Professor of Physik (Medicine) 1665 – 1728. Purpose built and incorporating especially reinforced deep pile foundations, from which we have a handful of Cambridgeshire clay, the Colin Forbes building houses over 350,000 rocks. Having a combined tonnage of around 50,000kg; each must be carefully weighed prior to storage in the stacks of Forbes Main Store in order to safely distribute this mass over the footprint of the building. We are interested in conversing with this displaced rockscape as a spectral and simultaneously volumetric environment - responding to the various economic, scientific and personal mobilities /energies that have formed it: opening drawers, handling specimens, re-voicing narratives of classification and exploring tensions between understandings of rocks as specimens, entities or exemplars. What happens if we gave voice to the stories of these rocky individuals and the absences left by their extraction? The archive reorders and differentiates matter that has been dislodged, broken and dispersed across the planet. In strata of shelving, boxes and drawers, labels and data, an aggregate geology of matter and meaning has been assembled. But what if the rocks refused to sit still? We are interested in the latency of the archive, in what might yet be unearthed from it and brought to light. It is spectral: housing the lingering presence of the past, the enigmatic nature of these materials, and the allure of partial knowledge. Might these rocky masses and mineral fragments refuse immobility and set the archive in motion as an unstable geologic process, of new sedimentations, metamorphoses and foldings that cannot be so easily fixed.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Other) |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Site-specific live video art exhibition and performance |
| Related records: | |
| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR |
| Divisions: | Schools and Research Institutes > School of Arts, Culture and Environment |
| Depositing User: | Jean Boyd |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Sep 2026 10:32 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Sep 2026 10:45 |
| URI: | https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/16518 |
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