A major new sculptural sound installation by Wirksworth Festival’s Artist in Residence 2023, Feral Practice, draws inspiration from Wirksworth’s annual Clypping ceremony to create a community of hybrid Rock.Plant.Human people coming together to collectively embrace and speak of the land.
The artist behind Feral Practice, Fiona MacDonald, describes her work as ‘working with human and nonhuman beings to create art projects that develop ethical and imaginative connection across species boundaries.’ During her residency, Feral Practice explored the connection between health and community.
Often people set up a divide between human and non-human beings, and between different categories of knowledge and understanding. Feral Practice works and converses across these barriers. A ring of treelike figures with outstretched limbs holds photographs of clasped hands. A mixture of voices, field sound and ambient music made with rocks fills the gallery space. Seven of the rocky heads contain speaker-mouths, each with a different story to tell.
Holes everywhere, vertical and horizontal, shafts and tunnels and soughs. A tunnel from Middleton to Harboro rocks. A tunnel from Dale Quarry to Ravenstor. Tunnels from the lead mine to the pub. Tunnels from then to now.
The sound piece has been crafted by Feral Practice from many hours of recordings and interviews with local people, whose contrasting personal and professional experiences include the disciplines of medicine, geology, industry, botany, history, spirituality and politics. They offer up fascinating insights and original perspectives into this most holey of landscapes.
The quarrying industry carves down through eons of time and once-living bodies. Peregrine falcons wheel and dive across their naked cliffs. The toxic ground of old lead mines become humpy sanctuaries for threatened species of flowers and insects. Plants ‘speak’ the geology of landscape – through their distribution and health we can infer what lies beneath. Alpine Pennycress and Leadwort draw lead up into their leaves and flowers, reducing their own vulnerability to grazing animals, and detoxifying the land. What might these fragile survivors teach us about resilience and healing in these dangerous times?
Accompanying the installation is a new group of paintings inspired by the topography, colours, minerals and flora of local quarries and lead mines. The paintings layer views from above at different scales. Tools of measurement, navigation and acquisition like data, diagrams, maps and plans are here repurposed and abstracted so as to hold different qualities of information inside and alongside each other, muddling hierarchies and building complexity. Botanical, geological and topological information jostle, articulating the impossibility of capturing any singular truth, but offering an object of tenderness and space for imaginative contemplation.
Visit the installation at The Maltings (map venue 3) between 10am-5pm during the Art and Architecture Trail Weekend or between 2pm-4pm during the 9th – 15th September. For more information about Feral Practice visit www.feralpractice.com.