The geological term erratic refers to a boulder transported from its place of origin by glacial movement and deposited elsewhere, sometimes many miles away.
Dunhill and O’Brien first encountered an image of one particular erratic at the Natural History Museum in London. Struck by its improbable position, elevated on three small supporting rocks, they travelled to Yorkshire to find it. There, among an area of rocks seemingly scattered at random, sat the boulder on its limestone plinths.
Using blue tarpaulin bought from a local hardware store, they made a temporary skin for the rock. This was less a homespun homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude than a way of taking possession of its form. Wrapped in the rolling Yorkshire landscape, the boulder appeared packed and ready for further transportation.
That journey continued, albeit as an image, to Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu, Japan’s celebrated daimyo strolling garden.
Two works were made for an exhibition at the Sanuki Folk Craft Museum. In Erratic, an image of the boulder travelled at glacial speed along a narrow track running the length of the gallery. The movement was calculated so that, over the six weeks of the exhibition, the image covered the same proportional distance that the original erratic had travelled from its geological source. The scale of the image was likewise calculated in relation to the length of the track, at a ratio of 11:1.
Blue tarpaulin is widely used to protect objects from the weather. In the Takamatsu area Dunhill and O’Brien encountered numerous improvised uses of this ubiquitous material, documenting at least 78 distinct sculptural forms.
This project was funded by Tokyo University of the Arts, with special thanks to Professor O JUN, Associate Professor Yusuke Nishimura, Yoshinori Takakura, Kenta Kawagoe