Rocks and stones are not always treated kindly. They are cast as dumb, unfeeling and burdensome: we find ourselves ‘between a rock and a hard place’, try to ‘get blood out of a stone’, or think of Sisyphus condemned to push his boulder uphill for eternity. Elsewhere, notably in Japan and China, rocks have long been objects of contemplation, veneration and pilgrimage.
Stone Appreciation III brings together videos of Dunhill and O’Brien drawing and measuring large boulders in British landscapes with films of their attempts to model the same rocks from memory. Working together in clay, they could see neither the form taking shape nor each other’s hands.
The task quickly became a strange form of negotiation. Hands occasionally collided; one person’s carefully resolved section might be turned away on the modelling stand and altered or erased by the other; each was repeatedly forced to make sense of a form they had not made themselves. The expansive business of clambering over, under and around a boulder in an effort to grasp its dimensions was translated into something smaller, more intimate and no less awkward: two people trying to construct a shared object by touch.
This project was supported by research funding from the University of the Arts London.