“Map of Erosion”
Artists Carol Laidler and Pat Jamieson have collaborated on a series of text based site-specific projects. Their process is one of engagement and intervention with place and audience. It is a walking practice where chance encounters, sensory experience and performance combine with historical, environmental and scientific research to provoke new ways of looking at the world.
Carol and Pat will introduce their collaborative process and share a 12 minute long sound poem “In your shell like” that they installed in a seaside shelter in 2023, as a part of their ongoing project “Map of Erosion”.
In their research for this they’ve been walking the coast between the Seven Sisters chalk cliffs and Dungeness, where the power station must be reenforced daily with shingle from Rye and Pett Level.
They have been talking with scientists, making observations through photographs and recordings, writing, drawing and working sculpturally with materials suggested by the landscape and the industries that emerged in East Sussex: chalk and flint, charcoal and iron.
They are considering:
The movements and effects of sea and wind, how chalk, flint and cliffs are formed (geological time).
The transformation of the landscape - deforestation due to use of charcoal for the smelting of iron, a process that began in the iron age and continued on an industrial scale with the Romans (archaeological time).
An exploration of memory loss, dementia and aphasia, mapping the changes that take place in the brain, the erosion of our own bodies (human time).
They are looking at parallels between themselves and the landscape, to situate the human as part of, not apart from, the natural structure; carbon in a carbon landscape