A postcard of John Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1868 painting first drew Dunhill and O’Brien to the Bowder Stone, not least because of the staircase attached to it — turning an already improbable boulder into something part viewing platform, part architecture.
For a solo exhibition at Gallery Fleur in Kyoto, they made a full-scale fabric transcription of the upper section of the rock. Seventy metres of cotton calico were fitted directly over its surface, rather like a dressmaker’s toile, before being removed, transported to Japan and reconstructed in the gallery on a framework of wooden props and sandbags.
What interested Dunhill and O’Brien was the strange displacement involved: a kind of soft cast taken from a massive outdoor landmark and carried into a subterranean gallery on the other side of the world.
Alongside this, the Stone Appreciation Study Room brought together images and objects relating to the cultural lives of particular rocks and stones, developed with Fine Art students at Kyoto Seika University.
This project was supported by Kyoto Seika University and the University of the Arts London.